ROBERT T.

CONN

BOLÍVAR’S
AFTERLIFE IN
THE

AMERICAS
Biography, Ideology,
and the Public Sphere
Bolívar’s Afterlife in the Americas
 Robert T. Conn

Bolívar’s Afterlife
in the Americas
Biography, Ideology, and the Public Sphere
Robert T. Conn
Wesleyan University
Middletown, CT, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-26217-4    ISBN 978-3-030-26218-1 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26218-1

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 Acknowledgments

I owe deep gratitude to Megan Laddusaw, acquisitions editor for History

at Palgrave Macmillan, for her interest in my project and her support as I
brought it to its final point. I thank the two peer reviewers, who, in their
careful assessment of the manuscript, offered clear and precise recommen-
dations for improvement. Christine Pardue, assistant editor, expertly
shepherded the book through the design and marketing phase.
Independent editor Victoria Stahl assisted in important ways with final
editing and preparation of the manuscript for delivery, and I am most
grateful to her.
This project took many years to complete, and support has come from
many quarters. I owe Chap. 14 to Mary Long of University of Colorado,
Boulder. It was first a paper for a conference organized by Mary and then
expanded into a longer essay for a book co-edited by her and Linda Egan
(University of California, Davis), entitled Mexican Intellectuals Reading
the United States [Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2009]. I thank
Vanderbilt University Press for allowing me to adapt the essay for this
book. Fernando Degiovanni (CUNY Graduate Center), my former
Wesleyan colleague, organized a panel at a meeting of the Latin American
Studies Association at which I presented a paper on Waldo Frank’s 1951
Bolívar biography, now the second part of Chap. 11. José del Pino of
Dartmouth College invited me to give a lecture, which became the blue-
print for my discussion of Bolívar in Colombia in Chap. 12. Diana Sorensen
of Harvard University also invited me to speak on the project. I thank all
these scholars for giving me the opportunity to share my work and develop
it in dialogue with other researchers.

v
vi  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I have received other forms of assistance as well. Jeff Rider and Krishna
Winston, in their roles as chair of the Romance Languages and Literatures
Department and dean of the Arts and Humanities at Wesleyan University,
helped me secure a project grant for a trip I made to Venezuela, Colombia,
Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia in the summer of 2007. Significant funding for
this research trip also came from the Catherine and Thomas McMahon
Fund. In Caracas, historian Carole Leal Curiel welcomed me at the
Universidad Simón Bolívar Social Sciences Center, of which she was direc-
tor, as did her team of scholars. Several were kind enough to take me to
visit the Archivo de Bolívar, the Central University of Venezuela, and
Venezuela’s National Pantheon. I also thank Wesleyan for its generous
sabbatical policy.
Teaching has been an important part of this project. Over the years, I
have given four courses on Bolívar at Wesleyan University. I thank the
students for their dedication to and passion for the texts examined. I also
had the opportunity to explore the book topic in a graduate seminar I
taught at the Universidad de Buenos Aires in the summer of 2008 entitled
“Bolívar in the Américas.” Scholars and writers Cristina Iglesia and Noé
Jitrik made that teaching experience possible.
I thank Katherine Wolfe and Lisa Pinette of Wesleyan University’s
Interlibrary Loan Office, who assisted me in obtaining a great many of the
books I cite. Similarly, I thank Stella Villagrán of the Columbus Memorial
Library at the Organization of American States in Washington, D.C., who
helped me acquire documents related to the foundational moments of the
OAS of which I speak in Chap. 9.
Historian Ann Wightman, with whom I collaborated for many years in
our roles as members of Wesleyan’s Latin American Studies Program, was
a constant source of inspiration. US historian Patricia Hill, with whom I
similarly had the pleasure of working, inspired me through her commit-
ment to the scholars in the Center for the Americas’ Mellon postdoctoral
program and her intellectual generosity.
James McGuire, Melanie Khamis, María Ospina, Paula Park, and Valeria
López Fadul—colleagues in Wesleyan’s Latin American Studies Program—
have offered insights and encouragement. Carlos Dimas of the University
of Nevada at Las Vegas has given me food for thought about Latin
American Independence and the scholars and intellectuals who have
reflected on it.
Andrew Curran, my colleague in Romance Languages and Literatures,
has shared with me his knowledge of the French Enlightenment and has
  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS  vii

been an important interlocutor. Ellen Nerenberg and Antonio González,

also colleagues in Romance Languages and Literatures at Wesleyan, have
been supportive throughout the writing of the manuscript. Khachig
Tololyan, of Wesleyan’s College of Letters and founder and editor of the
journal Diaspora, has generously conversed with me over the years about
my project, while sending me books and articles on Bolívar and Latin
American independence.
My colleague in Spanish, Michael Armstrong Roche, made himself
available to speak about topics related to the history of both Spain and
Latin America, including the Habsburgs and Bourbons. I particularly
appreciate our conversations about the Spanish Cortes and Spanish liberal-
ism. Susanne Fusso, professor of Russian, East European, and Eurasian
Studies and Joseph M.  Siry, professor of Art History, also of Wesleyan
University, have stuck by my side, kindly asking me over the years for
updates on my progress, their words communicating their belief that what
I was doing was valuable. I thank Susanne for reading an early draft of the
Introduction and her thoughts about the order of the chapters and Joe for
pointing me to books on Paul Cret’s design for the OAS building and Pan
American architecture.
I also thank José M. del Pino, who invited me for a second time to
Dartmouth College in the winter of 2017 to speak about Bolívar’s Jamaica
Letter; Dr. John Gruendel and Dr. Jordan Kassalow for their interest in my
work; Tony Emerson, former managing editor of Newsweek International,
also for his interest in the project and questions about its narrative form;
Elizabeth Conn for her encouragement; Fernando Degiovanni for our
conversations about our field and his inspiration; my dissertation advisor at
Princeton University, Arcadio Díaz Quiñones, for his brilliant courses in
the late 1980s examining literature, historiography, and politics; and James
D. Fernández of New York University for encouraging me many years ago
to undertake the study and for his moral support along the way.
I cannot conclude these acknowledgments without stating my debt of
gratitude to Mary Long who over the years has taken time to talk with me
about this project. With her impeccable judgment, Mary has shared with
me her always sage and incisive thoughts. She has also been kind enough
to read individual chapters.
I am indebted to Cristina Iglesia for the extraordinary support she has
lent me over the long duration of my work on this book: from her stead-
fast belief that this project was worthwhile to her thoughts and comments
on moments and issues touched upon, and her wise counsel at an editorial
viii  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

level. Cristina’s generosity is known to many and I am fortunate to count

myself among those who have benefited from it.
I thank my parents, Nancy Tobin and the late Richard A. Conn, for all
they have given me.
Finally, I would never have been able to do the work of this project
were it not for my wife Fen Yao, who brings joy to my life through the
warmth of her company, the depth of her understanding, the inspiration
of her goodwill and commitment to others, and the intensity and sophis-
tication of her inquisitive mind.
 Contents

1 An Introduction  1

2 Toward a Usable Narrative 53

3 Bolívar in Nineteenth-Century Venezuela 77

4 José Martí and Venezuela: Redressing Bolivarian Doctrine 99

5 From Liberalism to Positivism: Gil Fortoul and Vallenilla

Lanz119

6 Rufino Blanco Fombona: An Exile in Spain155

7 The Construction of a Patrician Heritage and of

Calumny: Vicente Lecuna, La Casa Natal, El Archivo del
Libertador, and the Bolivarian Society171

8 Revising the Bolivarian Machine: A Venezuela Reclaimed

by New Intellectuals201

9 Pan Americanism Above Ground: Bolívar in the United

States227

ix
x  CONTENTS

10 A Rebirth255

11 Bolívar in the Wake of World War II: Gerhard Masur and

Waldo Frank281

12 The Bolívar-Santander Polemic in Colombia: Germán

Arciniegas and Gabriel García Márquez303

13 Bolívar and Sucre in Ecuador: A Case of Two

Assassinations349

14 Vasconcelos as Screenwriter: Bolívar Remembered371

15 Bolívar in Bolivia: On Fathers and Creators397

16 Institution Building in Peru: Ricardo Palma and Víctor

Andrés Belaúnde423

17 Bolívar in the Río de la Plata443

18 Epilogue469

Bibliography487

Index503
 CHAPTER 1

An Introduction

On December 17, 1830, just 47  years of age, Simón Bolívar, the most
important leader of Latin American independence, died on the northern
coast of New Granada (today Colombia), the cause long thought to be
tuberculosis. En route to Europe, he was leaving the hemispheric and
international stage he had dominated for almost 20 years. Escorting him
were 100 soldiers and members of his personal and military staff, includ-
ing servant/squire José Palacios who had been a slave of Bolívar’s family;
Belford Hilton Wilson who in 1822 had come from London at the recom-
mendation of his prominent father to join Bolívar’s inner circle following
in the footsteps of the near 7000 private British and Irish citizens that
beginning in 1816 had crossed the Atlantic to fight under Bolívar; and
Agustín Jerónimo de Iturbide who had arrived in 1827 and was a son of
the leader of Mexican independence who had crowned himself emperor in
1822 only to be deposed, then executed.1 But entourage notwithstanding,
Bolívar was not on a state mission. The world-famous figure was going to
Europe as an exile, cast out by the elites of Bogotá and declared persona
non grata in his homeland of Venezuela.
These, the final moments in the life of Bolívar are a good place to start
for our study of Bolívar’s afterlife in the Americas, especially when drawn
from the brilliant and informed imagination of Colombian author Gabriel
García Márquez whose novel of 1989 we are using as one source. Bolívar
is exiting, richly accompanied. The figures escorting him provide García
Márquez’s readers, and now us, with threads linking to individuals,

© The Author(s) 2020 1

R. T. Conn, Bolívar’s Afterlife in the Americas,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26218-1_1
2  R. T. CONN

­ rocesses, and contexts. As García Márquez knew well, these interests

p
have their own history in the story of how Bolívar has been represented.
Explored over 300 pages, the ending of Bolívar’s life that García Márquez
is newly defining and that has been the subject of so much attention with
interpreters beginning their narration at different moments acquires depth
and texture. It becomes much more than a finale.
Bolívar is the preeminent symbol of Latin America and the focus of
what could seem almost unrivaled posthumous attention, seen from his
own times forward as a force now for liberalism or other forms of moder-
nity, now for old regime values and authoritarianism, now for a mix of the
two, with the debate over the meaning of his figure having no end in sight.
He comes to us in biographies, histories, bulletins, political essays,
addresses, and numerous artistic renderings by painters, poets, fiction
writers, architects, and sculptors; in the built environment there are stat-
ues and public buildings that construct for him a legacy. Comparing the
different iterations of his figure in the facets of his afterlife is difficult to
do, as information is never constituted in the same way and the contexts
for engagement with his figure are inherently different.
We see Bolívar in the independence period 1810–1825, including his
battles and his major public texts. We hear of his relationships to his lieuten-
ants, those who were loyal to him and those who were not. We move quickly
from one point in his life to the next, lapping up a smattering of scenes: his
1815 Jamaica Letter; his controversial 1817 execution of a star rival,
African- and European-descended general Manuel Píar; the multiracial state
he advocated in his 1819 Angostura Address; his miraculous crossing of the
Andes in 1819; his dictatorship from August 27, 1828 to January 20, 1830;
his exile in May 1830; and his death that became prominent in the minds of
the publics of the Americas in 1930 at the moment of the centenary of his
passing celebrated throughout the hemisphere. It was the second major
hemispheric centenary of his figure, the first that of his birth in 1883.
Digging further, we learn more of the figure he cut for himself in the
period 1825–1830, after independence from Spain and in the context of
the political instability that prevailed throughout the new republics of
Spanish America. From his personal letters we find out about his views
on the old colonial town councils (cabildos) that resist the centralization
he wants for his region; his recourse to racist formulations to explain
social fragmentation and to dismiss from his perch in Bogotá a Mexican
hero of independence, none other than Vicente Guerrero, who was briefly
president of the new republic in 1829; and his continuing deployment
 1  AN INTRODUCTION  3

of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s concepts of civic virtue and the general will.

These concepts carried importance for him from the start of his career as
military man and leader—virtuous citizens now more than ever the sal-
vation of the state. On April 12, 1828, in the context of the constituent
assembly he called (the Convención de Ocaña/the Ocaña Convention),
he states in a letter to his long-time comrade-in-arms and now in effect
governing partner, José Antonio Páez: “I will make many sacrifices in
submitting to the general will but I will never accept even the title of
­citizen in a country badly constituted and for that reason discordant
and weak.”2
We also learn about revolt and resistance in the decades previous to
independence: actors who were indigenous and mestizo (Indian and
Spanish descended) who rose up against the colonial state; and creoles like
Bolívar (Spanish born in Latin America) who embraced Enlightenment
thought, particularly the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the
Citizen, and as Bolívar would later, the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
as they sought to rally support for separation from Spain but who were
imprisoned or executed when apprehended.
How and why do we know Bolívar? Why do the different locations that
his interpreters occupy matter? Why do we know of some acts, battles,
texts, and moments and not others? These questions provide the founda-
tion for our study of the uses of Bolívar in the republics of the Americas,
and our inquiry will help us see why that story—his afterlife—must con-
cern us as an object of investigation. No figure, it can be argued, has been
more integrated into the cultural and political discourse of a region than
Bolívar has in the Americas. Another biography is not vital; rather we are
looking to illuminate the conditions that make Bolívar’s life felicitous for
postmortem symbolism and exploitation.
In this book we examine that integration as we reconstruct the pro-
cesses and actors that create Bolívar’s afterlife. We aim to recover not
Bolívar but those who have been concerned with him, some well known,
others not, all intervening in their national traditions and/or the Americas
in important ways using his figure and those who were connected to him.
What will unfold is a vast network of transmission that, for the most part,
has not been visible or that has been visible only in parts, parts mistaken
for wholes. If surrealism, existentialism, Marxism, Freudianism, post-­
structuralism, and deconstruction have provided common languages for
actors in the world to engage with in different settings, so has the figure
of Bolívar. Yet there is a fundamental difference. The discursive world of
4  R. T. CONN

Bolívar offers no methodology, nothing to study (though some have tried

to), only an historically significant and complex life that those who have
come after him have for different reasons used as a platform, some seeing
Bolívar as the paradigmatic humanistic model or hero who provides les-
sons for the present, others either critiquing that vision or seeing him in
entirely different ways. Bolívar—the Bolívar of his afterlives—is meaning-
ful for the present, for us, on account of what he can tell us about the past.
That past, which is multiple, is the cultural and political history of the
nations of the Americas.
The history of the uses of Bolívar and of those of figures related to him
that we tell in this book passes through two narrative frames, worked and
reworked by interpreters. For them it is a question of literacy, just as it
must be for us.
The first is that of independence, a process triggered by Napoleon who
was a contemporary of Bolívar and with whom Bolívar is often paired.
Napoleon’s occupation of the Iberian Peninsula in 1808 spurred the cre-
ation of juntas (provisional governments) across the domains of Spain in
the Americas, juntas that initially declared loyalty to Fernando VII, placed
by Napoleon under house arrest in Bayonne, France. In Spain there was
immediate military resistance to the invasion. Juntas also formed there,
and a military alliance was established with the United Kingdom. In south-
western Spain “the Cortes” was refounded. This was Spain’s parliament,
which declared in 1812 a constitutional monarchy with the absent
Fernando VII to uphold that constitution upon his return and that
included representatives from colonies still controlled by Spain.
In Latin America the wars and political processes that began in 1809 with
the first junta in La Paz, Bolivia (its members soon executed) unfolded in
three major theaters—the viceroyalty of New Spain centered in what is
today Mexico; northern South America; and southern South America. They
were defined to different degrees by division from within, with allegiances
split between royalist and independentist, centralist and regionalist. The
context they shared was that of a global order upended by Napoleon, fol-
lowed by the new conservative European regime in the form of the Holy
Alliance that came into being after his defeat in 1814, which for Spaniards
and colonials meant the return of a Fernando VII who surprisingly for many
reestablished absolute monarchy subsequent to the four-year tenure of the
Cortes. In the northern South American theater, Bolívar and his lieutenants
won great victories, but also suffered terrible and consequential losses, tra-
versing vast swaths of unimaginably difficult terrain.
 1  AN INTRODUCTION  5

Looking at the period of independence (1809–1825), we come upon

scenes told and retold, each one acquiring autonomy: Bolívar writing his
December 15, 1812 Manifiesto de Cartagena (Cartagena Manifesto) after
the defeat of Venezuela’s First Republic by the Spanish and royalist
Venezuelans (1811–1812); Bolívar crossing the Andes from New Granada
to establish the Second Republic in Caracas (1813–1814)—the Admirable
Campaign—and issuing his controversial Decree of War to the Death to
turn royalist Venezuelans to his side; Bolívar devastatingly defeated little
more than a year later at the hands of the crown-defending populist leader
José Tomás Boves who abhorred upper-class, white Venezuelans of which
Bolívar was one (mantuanos), with thousands of the city’s residents aban-
doning their homes in flight from the caudillo Boves and his impressive
force of mixed-­race plainsmen; Bolívar in exile in 1815 penning what would
become known as the Carta de Jamaica (the Jamaica Letter)—Spain having
retaken not only Venezuela, but also New Granada (today Colombia) as
well as important areas of Mexico; Bolívar, subsequent to his return to the
mainland after receiving assistance from the first president of the Republic
of Haiti, Alexandre Pétion, bringing under his command the patriot caudi-
llo figures of the eastern provinces of Venezuela and making his way up the
Orinoco River to set up camp in Angostura, Venezuela (today Ciudad
Bolívar), the site of the Third Republic (1817–1819); and Bolívar enticing
7000 English and Irish fighters who came to serve under him.
Further, we see Bolívar delivering his Discurso de Angostura (Angostura
Address) on the topic of founding a state on February 15, 1819, in which,
in addition to the multiracialism of which we spoke, he vowed to end
slavery—a commitment he had made to Pétion; Bolívar several months
later, instead of continuing to confront the battalions of Spanish com-
mander Pablo Morillo in Venezuela, leading his soldiers over the Andes to
take the town of Boyacá on August 7, 1819, and liberate New Granada;
Bolívar, subsequently, returning across the southern plains into Venezuela
to join caudillo leader José Antonio Páez to win independence for
Venezuela in 1821 at the Battle of Carabobo; Bolívar, after achieving the
liberation of the north, going south with Antonio José de Sucre as his
lieutenant to free in 1822 the presidency of Quito (today Ecuador), in
1824 the viceroyalty of Peru (with the Battle of Ayacucho on December 9),
and in 1825 Alto Peru (Upper Peru), today the country named for him,
Bolivia; and finally, in the context of the narrative of independence, Bolívar
calling his Congreso de Panamá in 1826 in an attempt to build a hemi-
spheric diplomatic and military alliance for the new and future republics.
6  R. T. CONN

But along with this narrative, there is another that shaped his life and
career, as well as the Americas, intersecting with that of independence but
extending beyond it and having great significance for the future: that of
the multiregional state that Bolívar conceived, saw established as a state on
December 17, 1819, and a republic in 1821, with himself as president,
with the battle over it and its possible alternatives, including the Federation
of the Andes that Bolívar dreamed of, defining the politics of 1826–1830
(this the year it unraveled and Bolívar ended up in exile). This multire-
gional state is Colombia, the third Latin American state to come into
existence after Haiti and the Río de la Plata, though convention refers to
it as the Gran Colombia to distinguish the polity from the modern state
that splintered off and that, eventually, 55 years later, in 1886, under the
leadership of Conservatives, took its name. The territorial limits of the
Gran Colombia mostly corresponded to those of today’s Colombia,
Venezuela, and Ecuador. Its capital was Bogotá.
Over the decades, writers, intellectuals, historians, and politicians
have engaged Bolívar’s figure by reworking moments and scenes from
both the narrative of independence and that of the Gran Colombia and
his project for the Federation of the Andes (also known as the Bolivian
Federation) as they have molded his figure for their distinct political proj-
ects and publics.
The scenes in the second narrative include once again February 15,
1819, when Bolívar sketched out the Gran Colombia in his Angostura
Address, proposing that its constitution should be a variation on the
British Constitution with the monarch replaced by a president and with the
addition of a fourth branch of government, a Greek- and Roman-inspired
body of censors dealing with matters of civil and public conduct, including
education; December 17 of that year when the Congress of Angostura
declared the state; 1821 when the continuation of that congress, now the
Congress of Cúcuta, named for its location in the New Granadan city,
furnished the state with a constitution inspired by the model of that of the
United States, making the Gran Colombia a republic; 1825, when Bolívar
reached his full glory, the liberator of almost half a continent and head of
state not only of the Gran Colombia, but also of Peru and Bolivia; 1826, when
Bolívar wrote his Bolivian Constitution at the request of the new republic
named for him, a constitution in which he called for a mixed government
defined by elements of monarchy (as seen in his lifetime president), of
­republicanism (as seen in his electoral, legislative, and judicial branches), and
of moralism (as seen in his body of censors, now placed in the legislative
 1  AN INTRODUCTION  7

branch); 1826–1828, the years he promoted the idea of a new, even larger
state that would aggregate the regions of the Gran Colombia and the
newly liberated territories of Peru and Alto Peru into the new union of
which we have spoken—the Federation of the Andes—with a modified
version of the 1826 Bolivian Constitution providing it with its legal
foundation.
In addition, there is, as we have said, the period of 1828–1830, when
Bolívar turned the Gran Colombia into a dictatorship—he and Francisco
de Paula Santander—the vice president of the Gran Colombia who had
served under him in military campaigns and who had been acting presi-
dent of the Gran Colombia during the time of the Colombian armies’
offensives in Quito, Guayaquil, Peru, and Alto Peru—having been unable
to agree at the Ocaña Convention in the spring of 1828 on the form that
the state should take; within that period, September 25, a month into his
dictatorship, when he was the target of an assassination attempt by liberal
opponents, Santander presumed to be the inspiration behind it; and
January, 1830, the moment Bolívar, holding to his commitment, both
ended his dictatorship and convened the Congress of Bogotá or Admirable
Congress (January 20–May 11)—the latter name riffing on that given to
his first crossing of the Andes—with instructions for delegates to write a
new constitution, using the 1821 Cúcuta Constitution as their model,
and vote a president.
Throughout his military campaigns and political career Bolívar con-
vened civilian bodies, be they assemblies or constituent congresses, ceding
his authority to them: in 1813 to a body of notables which then appointed
him military dictator; in 1819 to the Angostura Congress which then
elected him president; in 1828 to the Ocaña Convention; and of course,
in 1830 to the Admirable Congress. That congress elected a president, not
Bolívar but New Granadan Joaquín Mosquera.
This was the beginning of the last chapter of the Gran Colombia, which
for some time had been fractured, reduced to a structure with power only
over the territorial limits of present-day Colombia in addition to Panama.
Still a part of the Gran Colombia, the region of Venezuela had functioned
with autonomy from mid-1826 forward, having declared independence
from Bolívar’ state that year and achieved a new political arrangement. As
for the territory that would become Ecuador and that in the Gran
Colombia was referred to as the southern district, in 1828 Juan José
Flores, the leader of one of the three departments of that district, wrote
to Santander about his desire for the region to secede, but soon found
himself embroiled in a war that broke out on June 20, 1828, between the
8  R. T. CONN

Gran Colombia and Peru. The war ended with Flores’s and Antonio José
de Sucre’s victory for the Gran Colombia at Tarqui on February 27, 1829.
A year and a half later, subsequent to the decision of the Admirable
Congress not to elect Bolívar, Ecuador seceded. Weakening the prospects
for the Gran Colombia in this was not only the fact of regions desirous of
being autonomous, but also the assassination of Sucre on June 4, 1830,
less than a month after the close of the congress. Sucre had served as its
president, with the bishop of Santa Marta, José María Esteves, serving
alongside him as vice-president. He had been anointed by Bolívar to be
his successor, but he had declined to lead the Gran Colombia. Earlier
Bolívar had appointed him president of Bolivia, passing the office to him.
With Sucre’s death, the Gran Colombia was not only without Bolívar, but
also without the person most capable of preserving it were he to change
his mind and assume the mantle he had refused. Sucre’s assassination did
not go unanswered. Bolívar’s other main general, Rafael Urdaneta,
revolted on September 4, 1830, taking control of the state from Mosquera.
Bolívar, who was on the northern coast with the intention of leaving for
Europe, was slowly dying. Urdaneta was defeated in 1831, several months
after Bolívar’s death.
Among those who have deployed the two narratives of which we speak
to their advantage in recent years, two stand out: Colombian writer Gabriel
García Márquez whose novel we will continue to discuss (as we will in
Chap. 12) and former president of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez.
In The General in His Labyrinth, his only biographical novel, García
Márquez focuses on Bolívar in the final six to seven months of his life—his
corporal decomposition from tuberculosis running parallel to the political
disintegration of the Gran Colombia. Taking his readers from May of 1830
when Bolívar is forced into exile from Bogotá through his trip to the
northern coast, García Márquez brings his fictionalization of this life to a
close with the moment of Bolívar’s passing, December 17, the same day
11  years earlier the Gran Colombia was declared a state. Multiple time-
frames are given, including not only the trip itself with its beginning and
end, but also that of the anticipation and postponement of Bolívar’s death.
The final demise of his tubercular body is mistakenly reported from the
outset of the novel, notably by his many enemies, eager to see him gone for
good. There is, still, a third timeframe: a life story. García Márquez fash-
ions Bolívar’s trip to the coast as a platform from which to narrate through
the filter of bathos—the literary technique that gives voice to the ridiculous
and the trivial—the epic story he believes Bolívar’s life to be, as well as to
 1  AN INTRODUCTION  9

provide biographical sketches of military leaders and soldiers, of civilian

elites, and of members of the popular classes in what is a tightly woven
tapestry designed to recognize and explore subjectivities in addition to that
of Bolívar.
As for Hugo Chávez, who famously assumed the persona of the
Liberator (a moniker famously associated with Bolívar since 1813) to
shore up his political credentials and authority in both his campaign for
president of Venezuela and during his long tenure in that position—head
of state from 1999 to the year of his death in 2013—he also found ideo-
logical grist in Bolívar’s final year. In an assertion dating from 2007 and
typifying his relationship to the Bolivarian legacy, the public sphere, and
the historical record, the ever-theatrical Chávez who nationalized indus-
tries, created innovative social programs for the poor, and enacted partici-
patory councils, turned the circumstances surrounding Bolívar’s exile and
death into a stage. Bolívar did not die of tuberculosis but was assassinated
in his prime by the elites who saw their local capitalist interests threatened
by him and the state that was the Gran Colombia, Chávez claimed.
Determined to secure proof of this, in 2010 Chávez had Bolívar’s remains
disinterred and examined by scientists who, while finding no traces of TB
and no evidence of trauma, did identify traces of arsenic. The absence of
TB did not necessarily mean that Bolívar could not have suffered from the
disease, since it commonly does not spread beyond the lungs and soft tis-
sue. A group of doctors in the United States also looked at the evidence,
concluding that arsenic could very well have been the cause of death not
only because Bolívar perhaps was exposed to it through the water he was
drinking, but also because he may have been using it for years to combat
his ailments, including arthritis. Arsenic was the best treatment available at
the time for unexplained health problems and the VIP medicine of choice.
As for Venezuela’s scientists, they reached the decision that a cause of
death could not be determined definitively. Still, Chávez came to two con-
clusions: the first that Bolívar died of arsenic; the second that the manner
in which the substance entered his body was not through long-term inci-
dental or purposeful consumption but by foul play. Indeed, foul play was
the ending to Bolívar’s life adopted by Venezuelan filmmaker Alberto
Arvelo in his 2013 Libertador that culminates with a band of men training
their rifles on a distinctly healthy Bolívar who in a scene just before has
directed his closest lieutenants—General Rafael Urdaneta and a still alive
General Antonio José de Sucre—to reclaim Venezuela and the south.3
10  R. T. CONN

Our purpose in speaking of two distinct constructions of Bolívar’s

much discussed ending in the context of what we are identifying as the
narrative of independence and that of Bolívar’s state projects, first and
foremost the Gran Colombia, is to begin to articulate the complex and
shifting ground on which Bolívar’s interpreters have positioned them-
selves in their myriad accounts. A diverse collection of individuals, institu-
tions, and political groups spanning nations and continents, they as such
have largely been invisible, usually known in isolation from one another
even though they are related.
From the nineteenth century forward, these actors, which have
included military leaders, historians, sociologists, philosophers, writers,
artists, diplomats, political leaders, and heads of state, have gone, so to
speak, to Bolívar—central figure that he was in the process of the region’s
liberation, and prolific author that he was of texts detailing his own
actions, projects, and dreams—in order to articulate and promote their
visions, initiatives, and schemes. They have done so in the context of
modernization enterprises, social unrest, civil war, military insurrections,
dictatorship and democracy, liberation movements, and world war, as
well as in the context of the political and social debates that have accom-
panied all of this and of which they have been protagonists, using Bolívar
to elaborate and promote their positions on matters of social order, gov-
ernment, the economy, race relations, and leadership among others.
Cultural paradigms based on the idea of the nation state in addition to
related ones defined by race theory, all generated in France and other
European countries in the nineteenth century, became important in these
debates. They were used both to consolidate the authority of white elites
before peoples who were multiracial, black, and indigenous and in some
cases, in just the opposite way, to contain and marginalize individual
countries’ traditional elites. In Venezuela and Peru we will see examples
of the latter.
A time period of particular importance in the story we tell is that of the
first half of the twentieth century when political and cultural discourse
saw Bolívar’s figure used across the Americas. The forces driving this phe-
nomenon were the Venezuelan state and the corps of intellectuals sur-
rounding it; the Spanish-Cuban-American War of 1898, which saw the
United States seize Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines from Spain;
and the US hemispheric movement that came into being just a few years
before the fateful year of 1898 and that is known as Pan Americanism
(1889–1950s).
 1  AN INTRODUCTION  11

But relatively little is known about all these actors and processes.
Forged representations of Bolívar have slipped unnoticed into the archives,
become assimilated as factual or objective accounts, been locked away in
individual national or academic bodies, and have been dismissed as mere
patriot writing. We are left not only without a sense of the broad political
and ideological interest that Bolívar’s figure has generated, but also, then,
without an understanding of the fact that the work produced about him
is a part—in fact a central part—of the story of nation building and hemi-
spheric globalism in the Americas.
For reasons having to do with how Bolívar has come down to us, we
organize our narrative around the nation state using the actors who have
claimed and debated the meaning of his figure to tell nine different, inter-
related national stories. The nation states of which we will speak are the
so-called Bolivarian countries—Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and
Bolivia, countries whose territories Bolívar liberated—as well as others
where his figure has also been important discursively—the United States,
Cuba, Mexico, and Argentina. In our discussion of the integral actors, we
will be particularly interested in the parameters they lay out for discussion
of Bolívar’s figure, whether disciplinary or other, and the historical condi-
tions under which they do so; how the parameters they conceive articulate
with previous and existing frameworks both inside and outside the coun-
tries in which they are located; and how they can be seen as originating or
continuing a discursive criterion or tradition. The meaning of Bolívar, we
can be sure, is never exactly the same. The stages of his life; his military
and political career; the state he was central in creating: the Gran Colombia,
and the one he imagined, the Federation of the Andes; his major public
texts (the Cartagena Manifesto, the Jamaica Letter, the Angostura
Address, and the Bolivian Constitution); the leaders and thinkers with
whom he is compared and brought into dialogue; the actors who have
written about him—writers, historians, and so on—are represented and
interpreted in accordance with the geopolitical concerns of each nation
and the specific projects of the cohort of expositors in question. Leaders
with whom he is paired, depending on the national tradition, include the
Venezuelan Francisco de Miranda, the Venezuelan Antonio José de Sucre,
the Venezuelan José Antonio Páez, the Colombian Francisco de Paula
Santander, the Argentine José de San Martín, the Mexican Agustín de
Iturbide, George Washington, and Napoleon.
To make sense of how Bolívar has circulated, we also pay close attention
to what he has represented as text. If discourse is a wordily affair made
12  R. T. CONN

possible by paper and electronic materials, Bolívar provides a wealth of the

former. He authored reams of letters, tenacious and prodigious corre-
spondent that he was, in addition to the major public documents of which
we have spoken—texts produced by him alone and with the assistance of
his scribes that engage with cultural and political identity and the complex
imperial politics of the times, replete with formulations that are weighty
and profound, and some pithy enough to be packaged and disseminated
through citation. Bolívar furnishes us with a written record, but that
record should not be taken at face value. At the end of his life he issued
instructions for his correspondence to be destroyed. It was not. Instead, it
became the subject of numerous projects of collecting, projects that have
been constitutive of Bolívar’s afterlives. A short story by the famous
Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges has a main character, an academic, go
to take possession of a recently found Bolívar letter.4
So many texts to engage with! Depending on which are examined and
interpreted, Bolívar comes to us in any number of ways in the representa-
tions we will examine, locked, it would seem, in a series of polarities. He
is seen now as the beginning of a new era; now as the continuation of an
old; now as a visionary; now as a figure grandiose and unrealistic; now as
a leader who created the conditions for the modern liberal republic; now
as just the opposite, one who in the end set the stage for overreaching
centralized government, dictatorship, and even civil war; now as a leader
who defended white hegemony; now as one who stood for racial equality
or for mestizaje (mixing of the races).
In the complex racial politics of Venezuela Hugo Chávez defined Bolívar
as racially mestizo, telling the nation that he was taking Bolívar back from the
white oligarchy. Bolívar was not white. Why was Chávez able to use Bolívar
for his state project? Could an Argentine president or a US American presi-
dent instrumentalize José de San Martín or George Washington in this way?
As Venezuelan historian Germán Carrera Damas tells in his 1969 El
culto a Bolívar (The Cult of Bolívar), institutions and initiatives were
established in Venezuela in the late nineteenth century and early to mid-­
twentieth century that identified Bolívar with the state and placed him at
the center of the intellectual community, this in addition to the previous
work of writers, intellectuals, politicians, and state leaders. Most impor-
tant are the National Academy of History, founded in 1888;5 the
Bolivarian Society of Venezuela, established in 1937;6 and the field of
study at the Central University of Caracas called Pensamiento Social del
Libertador (Social Thought of the Liberator), put in place by José Luis
 1  AN INTRODUCTION  13

Salcedo-­Bastardo between 1953 and 1956. Carrera Damas also speaks of

other instruments and forms of promotion, including Bolívar monu-
ments, in particular statues commissioned by regional city governments
and Caracas from a relatively early moment in the republic, and of diplo-
matic efforts to promote the study of Bolívar at foreign universities.
Venezuelan-donated statues now occupy important places in the major
cities of the world and are taken as natural parts of the built environment,
for example, in Paris, Buenos Aires, New York, and Washington, D.C.
One diplomatic effort Carrera Damas recounts is that of a Venezuelan
ambassador to Great Britain who in 1967 sought to have Cambridge
University create a Bolívar chair at its Centre of Latin American Studies
with a grant from his government. The ambassador told of his efforts in
the Venezuelan press, using the apparent interest on the part of one of the
most important universities in the world to shame the Venezuelan people.
Appreciation for Bolívar was greater abroad than at home, he proudly
asserts, the spiritual values of the new middle class out of synch with those
of the state.7 Here was an ambassador administering civic lessons to
Venezuelans. He was hardly the first to do so and would, as we have
pointed to, not be the last, but was part of a long tradition.
To follow the integral actors, themselves in debate with one another, is
to see that they have not only intervened in their respective traditions
across multiple contexts, responding both to one another and members of
national contingents elsewhere; it is also to see that they have frequently
crossed borders propelled by the realities of exile, emigration, and other
forms of displacement at the same time that they have been augmented
from without. Émigrés and temporary residents join their ranks to reflect
upon, construct, and use a Bolívar tradition.
For those who have engaged with Bolívar beyond their own borders,
several countries, including the United States, Mexico, Venezuela, and
Spain, have functioned as both an inside and an outside, either receiving
or expelling them, and sometimes doing both. Two stories are particularly
important: that of the Cuban intellectual José Martí to whom we dedicate
a chapter, and that of the Chilean poet and diplomat Pablo Neruda. Both
figures are icons in the hemisphere constituting discursive sites, and their
connections to the political and institutional processes in the countries
through which they passed must be understood.
Martí, who uses the figure of Bolívar in important ways in his intellec-
tual production, came upon him right at the beginning of his storied exile
in New York City from 1880 to 1895. The context was his friendship with
14  R. T. CONN

other exiles, those from Venezuela. In 1881 he traveled to Caracas, where

he was first embraced by the country’s head of state, Antonio Guzmán
Blanco, then forced to leave after he refused Guzmán Blanco’s request
that he produce an article about him, having published one paying tribute
to a recently deceased and highly distinguished Venezuelan intellectual.
The person he had written about was Cecilio Acosta, portrayed by Martí
as representing the Enlightenment and nineteenth-century liberalism—
committed to reading in different traditions and to critical thought as well
as to the building of institutions—a depiction that irked the Venezuelan
leader who had been in power already for 11 years and who was leading a
vast modernization project.8
Pablo Neruda, to whom we do not dedicate a chapter but on whom we
will focus our attention now, similarly alighted upon Bolívar outside his
country of origin, in Neruda’s case not as an exile, but as an itinerant intel-
lectual. Neruda had been appointed special consul by the Chilean govern-
ment to help Republican exiles fleeing Spain’s Francisco Franco to relocate
in Mexico. The state initiative had been put in motion by Lázaro Cárdenas,
president of Mexico from 1934 to 1940 and who in 1938 nationalized the
country’s oil industry. Bolívar could hardly have been on Neruda’s mind,
but as the world would learn with his 1948 publication, Heights of Machu
Picchu, the sites to which his travels took him provided content for
his poems.
The place of interest to us in Mexico and at which Neruda would find
himself was the Simón Bolívar Amphitheater, an important venue in the
moment. Here, in 1941, the world in turmoil, Neruda recited before an
overflowing audience “Un canto para Bolívar” (“An Ode to Bolívar”) on
the occasion of Bolívar’s birthday, July 24. Through his figure Neruda
connected the anti-fascist cause in Spain—where he had been in residence
as a Chilean diplomat and a close friend of such major intellectuals as
Federico García Lorca and a courageous defender of refugees, arranging
for the escape of hundreds sheltered in southern France to Chile—to the
amphitheater bearing Bolívar’s name.9 The poem portrays Bolívar as a
Christ-like father who is the spiritual embodiment of Latin America’s
prized natural resources. Bolívar’s name modifies tin, for example, in what
is a vision of resource-nationalization, inspired by Cárdenas’s nationaliza-
tion of oil. Neruda’s poem goes on to celebrate a Spanish Republican
captain of the Fifth Regiment which defends Madrid in 1936. The captain
at the end of the sequence is revealed to be a reincarnation of the
Venezuelan leader: “I awake every hundred years when the people awake,”
 1  AN INTRODUCTION  15

says the captain in response to the question in the final stanza, “Are you or
are you not Bolívar?”10
Neruda had walked into a place of Bolívar’s afterlife, the amphitheater.
Eleven years earlier it had served as one of the Mexican locations of the
hemispheric-wide centenary of Bolívar’s death and later named for him.
Throughout the book we shall have occasion to touch on the different
locations of the 1930 centenary and the political functions the celebra-
tions were made to perform.
The Mexican centenary is not well known but it was significant. The
force behind it was the new president of the republic, Pascual Ortiz Rubio,
who had been ushered into office by Plutarco Elías Calles through rigged
elections to defeat the famous intellectual José Vasconcelos—a fierce
opponent of Calles’s anticlerical politics. With the Mexican celebration,
which was synchronized with that of the United States, Ortiz Rubio was
turning the hemispheric event to his advantage, launching a yearlong
spectacle at locations across Mexico to produce civic c­ ulture.11 Coming
after Emilio Portes Gil, Ortiz Rubio was the second puppet president to
serve Calles and the first to be elected through the machinations of the
Partido Nacional Revolucionario (National Revolutionary Party, PNR),
the political party founded by Calles in 1929 with the aim of providing an
institutional basis for the new role he assumed as jefe máximo after his
predecessor and agreed-on successor, Álvaro Obregón, was assassinated
subsequent to his presidential victory in the 1928 elections. (The party in
1946 renamed itself the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, PRI.) The
vision of Bolívar Ortiz Rubio supported stood opposed to the iteration of
Bolívar that was already circulating in Mexico, the work of the individual
Ortiz Rubio had just defeated, José Vasconcelos. Vasconcelos, in his roles
as head of the powerful Secretariat of Public Education (SEP) between
1921 and 1924—the Obregón period—and as patron of the artists of the
new public art, muralism—all this in the heady days immediately following
Mexican Revolution (1910–1920)—had made Bolívar a familiar icon in
connection to the anti-imperialist vision he was articulating through the
large-scale cultural practices he spearheaded. One mural produced under
his direction stands out: Roberto Montenegro’s 1922 Hidalgo, San
Martín, Sucre y Tiradentes—the first hero Mexican, the second Argentine,
the third Venezuelan, and the fourth Brazilian—leaders and martyrs of
American independence that included George Washington to the far left
and Bolívar—the pillar of his hemisphere-projecting canon—in the center.12
16  R. T. CONN

The amphitheater was built between 1902 and 1910 as an addition to the
centuries-old Colegio de San Ildefonso that had been repurposed in 1868
under orders from Liberal president Benito Juárez to house the famous
National Preparatory School led by Gabino Barreda. In the 1920s, with
Vasconcelos as head of the SEP, the school became a home for muralism, with
none other than Diego Rivera making his muralist debut there with La cre-
ación (Creation), a multiracial story of the beginning of Latin America. Rivera
set the mural over the entire back wall of the amphitheater’s stage. Subsequent
to the 1930 Simón Bolívar Centenary festivities and the decision to bestow
Bolívar’s name on the amphitheater, new work was produced to harmonize a
name with a space. In the arcade leading to the amphitheater, Fernando Leal,
under contract by the SEP, created a nine-panel exposé of Bolívar and other
leaders of independence denouncing imperialism.13 The irony that was
Mexican muralism’s renewed claim on the amphitheater is apparent. What
had begun as an attempt to use Bolívar to produce civic virtue to whitewash
the controversial 1929 elections in the context of the all-important hemi-
spheric year that was the centenary celebration of his death, and that saw the
establishment of a new political party to authorize Calles, had morphed into
something else, indeed something familiar—a reassurtion of the figure of the
1920s—by the time Neruda made his appearance on the stage, with Rivera’s
mural behind him, Leal’s murals in the arcade, and the 1920s murals of José
Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros on the walls of the National
Preparatory School. The idea of the politicized nation dominated the site.14
The stories involving other countries go on. To the names of Martí and
Neruda, the latter who would use Bolívar for the Latin American histories
in verse he produced in the 1940s, can be added those of other significant
figures though far less known at a hemispheric level. They are the Peruvian
exile Víctor Andrés Belaúnde, the German émigré Gerhard Masur, and the
Colombian intellectual Germán Arciniegas. All three joined the ranks of
Bolívar interpreters in the United States, where historians and writers were
already producing works about his figure in the long moment that was the
US-led movement, Pan Americanism. Belaúnde and Masur crafted the major
pieces of their times—Belaúnde in the 1920s and 1930s with his book on
Bolívar, independence, and political philosophy; Masur in the 1940s with
his historical narrative, inspired by German historian Leopold von Ranke.
They are works that are still highly regarded within the Anglo-American
world and often used as sources for new renderings of Bolívar and indepen-
dence. The Colombian intellectual and historian Germán Arciniegas also
produced important essays and books on Bolívar in this context with his
intermittent stints as a visiting professor and as an exile from the 1930s
 1  AN INTRODUCTION  17

through the 1950s. He brought with him the critical terms of the national
debate in Colombia where Bolívar and Francisco de Paula Santander were
emblems of the country’s Conservative and Liberal Parties, respectively.
Uruguayan critic Ángel Rama—now something of a cultural icon in
Latin American academic circles across the world for his groundbreaking
1983 The Lettered City, a work that draws fascinating connections between
writing, elites, and power in Latin America—is another individual we can
add to our list of exilic actors who find Bolívar outside their countries, in
his case not Mexico or the United States but Venezuela.
Bolívar was important for Rama. In The Lettered City, he borrows from
Bolívar’s 1812 Cartagena Manifesto, a text in which the young military
man explains to his new hosts in Cartagena, New Granada why Venezuela’s
First Republic failed and why they should assist him in joint military action
to liberate Caracas. The failure was easy enough to understand, Bolívar
insisted, the result simply of Venezuelan leaders’ constitution of 1811—
the framework of the constitutions in Venezuela to follow. Nothing but
the scaffolding of an “airy republic” based on the US Constitution though
having as its executive a triumvirate, it foolishly empowered provinces at
the expense of the central government, provinces that became the site for
royalist reaction. Adopt a different constitution more in tune with the
needs of the country and the path toward independence in Venezuela
would be clear. Threats from outside Latin America had to be considered
as well. Perhaps more hyperbole than anything else, Bolívar warned of the
possibility of massive emigration from Spain, the occupied country’s eccle-
siastics, military leaders, and conservative social classes fleeing to the New
World, just as the Portuguese crown had to Brazil in 1808, escaping
Napoleon’s continental system. Latin America would be inundated with
individuals of a conservative and military mindset, so was the warning
from the young exile. As for Rama, how he adapts the Cartagena Manifesto
to his own purposes is important. Using Bolívar’s critique of the 1811
constitution, he characterizes the leaders of the First Republic in his own
terms as a lettered class that operates at a distance from reality. Rama, who
does not speak of the manifesto other than to highlight Bolívar’s
­denunciation of the constitution’s authors and supporters, or for that mat-
ter of other texts of Bolívar’s or moments from his career, had in the 1811
constitution, as filtered through Bolívar, an historical moment that could
stand for the entire period of Latin American independence, 1809–1825,
to anchor the centuries-long story he tells of elites who use their privileged
access to writing in order to preside over the wider social body.15
18  R. T. CONN

Rama came to Bolívar during the time of his residence in Venezuela in

the 1970s. He had been lecturing in Caracas when on June 27, 1973, a
military dictatorship overthrew the government in Uruguay. Rama, who
like many eminent scholars and writers was part of Latin America’s pro-
gressive Left, made the decision to remain. In the context of the Cold
War, military dictatorships had once again been taking hold in Latin
America, supported by an anti-communist United States in battle with the
Soviet Union and with Cuba, which became communist after its 1959
revolution. There was the military dictatorship in Brazil in 1964(−1985),
the one in Bolivia in 1971(−1978), and Chile’s in 1973(−1989); the
Argentine dictatorship followed in 1976, extending to 1983. Like other
progressives, Rama still had high hopes for a Cuba that would be open and
democratic within its socialist framework.
In the new context in which Rama found himself, now no longer just
an eminent visiting scholar, but also an exile, he soon founded in Caracas
the prestigious Fundación Biblioteca Ayacucho (Ayacucho Library
Foundation) series on Latin American classics. He borrowed the word
“Ayacucho” from the battle of December 9, 1824—the Sucre-Bolívar vic-
tory at Ayacucho signifying the completion of independence from Spain—
whose 150th anniversary was celebrated in Venezuela in 1974. He was
moving quickly, securing funding for the series from the Venezuelan presi-
dent Carlos Andrés Pérez in 197516 and inviting to Caracas eminent writ-
ers and scholars from 15 different countries at the end of that same year
for a four-day planning meeting, November 17–21.17
In a document entitled “Guide to General Themes” that he circulated
at that meeting of the steering committee, he explained the project, which
was to produce tomes on different areas of Latin American culture. He
proposed 40 per year over the course of 10 years to be executed by teams
of scholars. Rama gave importance to Brazil as he spoke of both
Portuguese- and Spanish-language cultural production. He also embraced
the Caribbean, to which he had recently traveled, desirous of covering
cultural expressions in the different languages that had arrived there
through colonialism, Spanish as well as French and English. Recognizing
the limits of the term Latin American, he also included indigenous litera-
ture and literature of and about the African diaspora. Indeed, he was inno-
vating, seeking to be inclusive in a new way. Covered would be both
sovereign and non-sovereign countries, in the second category Puerto
Rico and Martinique. He asked: how could one not include Aimé Césaire?
The areas of knowledge to be represented were literature, but also the vast
 1  AN INTRODUCTION  19

number of works that could not be categorized easily by discipline: for

example, chronicles of conquerors, explorers, and travelers; and works in
the social sciences, including sociology, which became a field in the late
nineteenth century but that in Latin America like philosophy, he explains,
was not exactly a discipline, connected as it was to state formation. He
included writers caught between national borders such as Guillermo
Hudson, the Argentine who moved to England at age 46 and whose writ-
ings were published there.18
Rama aimed to create a vision of the diverse parts of Latin America and
of its rich and varied culture so that the educated classes of the continent
could know of “their world” beyond the limits of their own countries,
limits that were inevitable but that needed to be overcome. The transna-
tional shared knowledge obtained through figures like the Argentine intel-
lectual and statesman Domingo Faustino Sarmiento or the Mexican writer
and scholar Alfonso Reyes—examples of the few who were read across the
continent—was hardly enough, he insists. As for the word “library” that
Rama incorporates into the title, it is a term that had long been used in
Latin American letters to mean collection.
Beginning in Mexico in the late 1930s and early 1940s, Alfonso Reyes
and the Dominican scholar Pedro Henríquez Ureña, who during his long
career both in Mexico and Buenos Aires had sought to establish the
humanities as a field of study, also used the word “library” as they imag-
ined publishing projects to make the Latin American classics they con-
ceived of available.19 In the years just before his death in 1946, Henríquez
Ureña established the Biblioteca Americana (American Library) for the
new Mexican press, the Fondo de Cultura Económica. His comprehensive
master list of texts to be published, which featured minor works intended
to awaken the interest of the common reader, not only that of the erudite,
included works from Latin America’s colonial period, from its republics,
from the region’s indigenous cultures, as well as works from Brazil.20
Jump forward 30  years. At the November 1975 planning meeting,
Rama submitted to the steering committee not only his “Guide to General
Themes,” but also what had inspired that guide: Henríquez Ureña’s ­master
list for his never realized Biblioteca Americana.21 The series moved ahead
without delay, as one year later a team of scholars brought out the first
volume of the Fundación Biblioteca Ayacucho, Simón Bolívar: Doctrina
del Libertador (Simón Bolívar: Doctrine of the Liberator).22 As might say
Carrera Damas, the institutional forces among which Rama found himself
encouraged if not mandated that selection.
20  R. T. CONN

Venezuelan historian Augusto Mijares, one of the members of the

Venezuelan team, penned the prologue, providing an iteration of
Bolívar’s figure that promised to appeal to 1970s readers, particularly in
his own country.23 Describing Bolívar as a politician and social reformer
in his title, Mijares presents him as standing first and foremost for the
abolition of slavery, as being an opponent of the oligarchies, as promot-
ing mestizaje or mixing of the races, and as caring about education at a
popular level—a supporter of the Lancasterian Method in which more
advanced students teach less advanced ones.24 For Mijares, Bolívar was,
fundamentally, as he has been for many Venezuelan interpreters, a figure
to be understood through the intellectual giants of the eighteenth-cen-
tury French tradition from whom he borrowed. They are the French
political thinker Charles Louis de Secondat Montesquieu (1689–1755)—
so important for the drafters of all republican constitutions, including
the US Constitution—and, as we have begun to see, the Genevan thinker
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) who brought new categories to
bear on the Enlightenment project represented by Montesquieu and also
by the Englishman John Locke.
Montesquieu and Rousseau, in a sense, could not have been more dif-
ferent from each other. Montesquieu created a discourse about the
dynamic interaction of forms of government from Greece through the
contemporary period with despotism and the tyranny of the people being
what are to be avoided; defined legitimate government as that which is
based in the law—both democratic and aristocratic republicanism valid
and monarchy also valid as long as there is a nobility able to check the
authority of the monarch and the monarch is a vehicle for the law; stipu-
lated distinct branches of government for both forms of republicanism;
promoted the idea of checks and balances which we see him apply also to
monarchy; and submitted that the different legitimate forms of govern-
ment he describes are applicable to peoples in accordance with matters
concerning the size of their territories and climates. In contrast, Rousseau,
while taking from Montesquieu, introduced into his vision of the state the
concern with inequality, power, and the controversial notion of the ­general
will, laying this out in The Social Contract of 1762. He defines the general
will as consisting of the people or the citizens, whom he describes as
sovereign—the general will not being the same as the institution of gov-
ernment. In the contract of which he speaks people give up rights to
assume duties as citizens.
 1  AN INTRODUCTION  21

The form of government that he advocated, as Judith N. Shklar explains

in Men and Citizens: A Study of Rousseau’s Social Theory, was aristocratic
republicanism. Rousseau wanted citizens to obey their magistrates—
government officials—but he also wanted them to have recourse to cri-
tique the inevitable inequality resulting from social and political institutions.
Property creates inequality. But Rousseau was concerned only “with elimi-
nating inequality in all its emotional and social manifestations, rather than
with establishing an egalitarian order,” says Shklar, who was herself taking
a position on Rousseau’s figure in the wake of the World War II, decades
during which interpreters linked his notion of the sovereignty of citizens
to totalitarianism.25 Creating the civic person was crucial for Rousseau.
Education, on which he famously wrote with his works Emile and Julie,
was a place in which to help build that person, a social subject who con-
cerns herself both with her own interests and public interests. In Emile,
Rousseau puts forward a theory of education in which the child is taught
to understand his relationship to the world, to see others as well as himself,
understanding, for instance, “the right of the first occupant by labor.”26
Entering adult life, a citizen will be able to call out unnatural inequalities,
those that have been produced by concentrations of wealth and power, in
a manner that is measured and sympathetic. Those unnatural inequalities
threaten a social fabric that in its ideal form for Rousseau is one in which
human beings live together with mutual respect.
But Mijares, in engaging with the 1811 federalist constitution railed
against by Bolívar in his 1812 Cartagena Manifesto—Montesquieu and
Rousseau foremost on his mind—does so in a manner quite different from
Bolívar or Rama, desirous of defending this, Venezuela’s first constitution.
Focusing on a feature of the constitution not always mentioned—the col-
lective executive or triumvirate, with the three rotating in their role as
decision-maker—Mijares tells not of out-of-touch legislators blinded by
the prestige of the new political thought in the United States and Europe
in regard to federalism, but instead discusses figures obsessed with the
possibility that “Venezuela’s republic would fall into a uni-personal despo-
tism, as happened in France with Napoleon, or that deliberative govern-
ment would give way in the face of the prestige of so-called caudillos.”27
The Roman office of the triumvirate was to be a stopgap, insurance against
the abuse of the executive branch—this a major concern for critics of
Venezuela’s nineteenth- and twentieth-century authoritarian political
tradition.
22  R. T. CONN

Constitutionalism is paramount for Mijares, who not only defends the

1811 constitution, strategically using the word obsessive to describe its
authors and those who sanctioned it. He also defends Bolívar as one who
recognized the authority of political bodies, a leader who never questioned
the right of legislators to overturn his ideas, as members of the 1821
Cúcuta Congress in fact did when they decided not to include in the Gran
Colombia’s constitution the fourth branch of government he proposes in
his 1819 Angostura Address, the Poder Moral or the Moral Branch. He
does not mention that the Cúcuta Congress did more than that, rejecting
the British-inspired, aristocratic republican model proposed by Bolívar
and instead adopting that of the United States. In his construction of
Bolívar, Mijares additionally affirms that in his constitutions Bolívar places
limits on the executive, though without mentioning the lifetime president
that Bolívar called for in the 1826 Bolivian Constitution and that he had
mused about in the Jamaica Letter in the moment he takes up again his
critique of federalism as a form of government for Venezuelans.
Furthermore, he states that Bolívar in the end did not stand against politi-
cal parties despite criticizing them throughout writings beginning with
the Cartagena Manifesto, where he views parties as also being responsible
for the fall of the republic. He states that Bolívar had the sound judgment,
patience, and moral courage necessary “to either confront or dodge that
constant pressure,” pressure that Bolívar also respected, public opinion
being the necessary counterweight to government.28 In the end, Bolívar
accepted, we are told, the political world of Bogotá in 1827, the moment
he was locked in battle with his (by this time) nemesis Francisco de Paula
Santander. He does not say anything about the attempt on his life, the trial
of the conspirators, the exile of Santander, or the 1828–1830 dictatorship.
Rama, during the decade of the 1970s that saw him in 1977 become a
Venezuelan citizen, the Uruguayan military government refusing to renew
his passport, and then in 1979 accept a position at the University of
Maryland, took an interest in the Venezuelan intellectual tradition, in par-
ticular in the early twentieth-century critic of Venezuelan dictatorship,
Rufino Blanco Fombona (who availed himself of Bolívar’s figure to defend
liberalism) and in Bolívar’s first mentor Simón Rodríguez. Both are extolled
in The Lettered City: Blanco Fombona for the obvious reason that he was
a figure with whom Rama could identify in the context of the new Latin
American dictatorships, Rodríguez as an actor who produced a model of
writing running counter to the Latin American tradition Rama rips into.29
 1  AN INTRODUCTION  23

As for Blanco Fombona’s own experience as an exile and his relationship

to book production, Rama does not mention this. But Blanco Fombona,
who played an important role in Bolívar’s afterlife in the twentieth cen-
tury, is a figure whose many years outside of Venezuela were enormously
productive. His battle with Venezuelan strongman Juan Vicente Gómez
became a boon for others.
Exiled in Spain, after his first years in Paris, Blanco Fombona oversaw
the publication of hundreds of books at Editorial-América, founded by
him in 1915.30 Considered by the standard of the cultural work it per-
formed, Editorial-­América rivals in importance if not surpasses that of the
Ayacucho Library Foundation, whose name he inspired. (He also used the
name “Ayacucho” for one of his multiple series about Latin America.)
With these publications, which included the Uruguayan José Enrique
Rodó’s 1915 Cinco ensayos: Montalvo, Ariel, Bolívar, Rubén Darío,
Liberalismo y Jacobinismo (Five Essays: Montalvo, Ariel, Bolívar, Rubén
Darío–Liberalism and Jacobinism)31 and the Bolivian Sabino Pinilla’s 1917
La creación de Bolivia (Creation of Bolivia),32 he not only brought Latin
American authors to the attention of a global Spanish-speaking audience,
but he also influenced national and international politics in the Americas.
Bolívar was an important object of reflection. Blanco Fombona edited col-
lections of Bolívar’s writings as well as works that had already been pro-
duced about him, boosting Bolívar’s legacy in accordance with his own
ideological vision. In a history he wrote that went from early modern/
colonial times in Spain to the present he presented Bolívar as the lynchpin
in the story of modernity.
As the Venezuelan critic Oscar Sambrano Urdaneta observes, Blanco
Fombona was speaking Bolívar’s name where it could not be spoken. Latin
American diplomats had been silent on the topic of Bolívar, he explains,
desirous of accommodating their hosts, who with the exception of the
important novelist and essayist, Miguel de Unamuno, were critical of
him.33 In 1914, inspired by Blanco Fombona, Unamuno brought out a
volume collecting the writings on Bolívar of major Latin American political
figures of the nineteenth century and also of Latin American intellectuals
living in Europe. For these intellectuals in Europe, Ernest Renan’s and
Hippolyte Taine’s theories on race and national culture, Gustave Le Bon’s
ideas on racial superiority and biological inheritance, and Cesare Lombroso’s
writings on criminology, with the important academic standing they had
achieved, were all the rage. One Venezuelan exile described Bolívar as hav-
ing descended into a dictatorial figure at the end of his life not because of
24  R. T. CONN

Rousseau but because of his Spanish heritage; Le Bon’s theory of heredity

allowed him to posit latent elements of Bolívar’s Spanish character that had
become actual. Blanco Fombona, who contributed to the volume and
whose vision of race we will address later, only winds down his mammoth
publishing project after the beginning of Spain’s Second Republic in
1931.34 Republicanism and democracy had returned to his adopted home-
land, and Blanco Fombona threw himself into the new Spain, knowing no
cultural distinction between one side of the Atlantic and the other. He
served as an administrator in southern Spain before his return to Venezuela
subsequent to the death of Gómez in 1935.
In Spain Blanco Fombona, other Latin American exiles, and Unamuno
had helped establish a tradition of reflection on Bolívar, preparing the way
for others to investigate and write about his figure for their particular
agendas. In 1930, the year of the centenary of his death celebrated across
the Americas, the Basque Spanish nationalist José María Salaverria brought
out Bolívar el Libertador (Bolívar the Liberator).35 Bolívar’s figure had
become newly known in Spain. He was part of the conversation. The
Soviets saw this in 1937. In the context of their promotion of the com-
munist Left in Spain’s civil war, they circulated Karl Marx’s English-­
language “Bolívar” encyclopedia entry of 1858 that they had translated
into Russian, then into Spanish, the first time the entry had been repub-
lished. Marx compared him in negative terms to Napoleon, describing
both as dictatorial and Bolívar’s resignations of which we have spoken as
less than sincere, legal form a sham. He even described his Bolivian
Constitution as having its inspiration in the Napoleonic Code of 1804. As
the US historian Hal Draper wrote in 1968, the later Soviets finessed
Marx’s dismissal of Bolívar, wanting to assimilate him to their own poli-
tics. That meant embracing Bolívar’s view of top-down education for a
populace not ready for democracy, a vision that Draper, in battle with mili-
tary dictatorships in Latin America who were using such notions to justify
their regimes, denounces.36 Draper will have nothing to do with Marx’s
view of Bolívar, Bolívar’s top-­down politics, the Soviets’ adaptation of that
politics, or for that matter the Venezuelan state’s instrumentalization of
Bolívar which was alive for him as it was for any professional historian
engaged with Latin America. He targets in particular historian Vicente
Lecuna, who presided over Bolívar’s ­legacy in Venezuela between 1916
and 1954, the year he died, and whose cultural work survived him.
 1  AN INTRODUCTION  25

New Authorities and Shared Narratives

in the Anglo-American Tradition

The story we tell of Bolívar and state formation in the Americas—with

Neruda, Martí, Masur, Belaúnde, Germán Arciniegas, Rama, and Blanco
Fombona as well as many others participating in that process by way of the
different kinds of displacements they experienced—can hardly be told
without sketching out how Bolívar has been made to appear in the tradi-
tion established by professional historians of Latin America over the past
half-century, one that today dominates academic discourse about Bolívar
and independence and that largely resides in the British and the US acad-
emy. That tradition emerged from the world of which we speak, borrow-
ing from it, positioning itself against it, and in the end reducing it to its
prehistory. The highly respected British historian John Lynch led the way
in that process with his 1973 The Spanish American Revolutions,
1808–1826.37 Lynch creates a new Bolivarian epic that obeys no specific
project of state making and that brings to reflection on Latin American
independence new critical categories useful in building non-racist, demo-
cratic republics. As Jaime E. Rodríguez O. commented at the time, here
was the history the world was waiting for, one that could finally take the
place, with economics and race in the foreground, of William Spence
Robertson’s classic 1918 Pan American-inspired Rise of the Spanish-­
American Republics as Told in the Lives of Their Liberators,38 a work that
leader- and Venezuela-centered though it was, was still being used as a
college and university reader, the last reprinting in 1967.39
Spanish-American independence was not to be seen, Lynch submits, as
a new beginning to be celebrated for ending the Spanish colonial system
and ushering in the republics of Latin America, but rather to be viewed
against the criteria of revolution and race relations, both matters of
immense importance in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Forget, in particu-
lar, the idea of rupture and discontinuity in relationship to the past.
Independence failed from a social perspective. Old hierarchies based on
race and class persisted and new ones came into being; and with Bolívar
striking a tragic figure, his hopes of a meritocratic, more socially just order
were dashed. His own political vision was marred by his attachment to the
idea of a hereditary senate, a concept taken from the English that Bolívar
elaborates in the Angostura Address.40
26  R. T. CONN

To tell of this revolution failed, Lynch places Bolívar against the back-
drop of the economic and social realities of the distinct regions he liber-
ated, paying particular attention to the roles played by racial and social
groups in the long process of independence and the places where those
groups found themselves when the new states came into being after inde-
pendence. With regard to Bolívar’s homeland, Venezuela, Lynch focuses,
in particular, on the pardos, using this indeterminate colonial category
comprising slave-descended, mixed-race free people as well as poor white
in the racial caste system of the region—a dynamic group representing
50  percent of the Venezuelan population in 181041—as a barometer to
examine how much the revolution accomplished from the perspective of
race. Bolívar, who was a creole—a person, as we have said, of Spanish
descent born in the Americas—was, Lynch explains, an abolitionist who
opposed self-rule for pardos. He and other white leaders initially did not
incorporate them in the military ranks out of concern this could be a path
to social and political power. But in 1815 caudillos began to recruit heav-
ily among pardos “to compensate for losses among creoles” with pardos
having the “chance of military promotion up to the middle rank of the
officer corps.”42
This must have unsettled Bolívar. As Aline Helg tells us in her 2004
book, Liberty and Equality in Caribbean Colombia, 1770–1835, which
explores the historical, geographical, and social obstacles preventing a
black movement from taking shape on the northern coast of New Granada,
Bolívar even invented a word for pardo rule, pardocracia.43 But it was not
just pardos. In the utopia Bolívar imagined, Lynch informs us, he did not
want one race to dominate another but instead hoped to create a society
free of race claims, pardocracia being just as execrable as albocracia, rule
of whites.44 Indeed, Bolívar’s 1819 Angostura Address proposes the cre-
ation of a state that serves citizens of different skin colors.
Lynch follows Bolívar from region to region as he addresses race and
social questions in the context of local economies and the prosecution of
the war. In regard to New Granada, Lynch tells of Bolívar’s 1819 order to
his lieutenant, General Francisco de Paula Santander to recruit 5000 black
slaves from the mining area of the western coast, Chocó and Antioquia.
The justification for that order was that slaves needed to fight for their
liberty just as whites did, the latter group having been disproportionately
reduced in numbers in the Venezuelan war arena (1811–1819). Bolívar,
we are told, is correct about the proportion of lives lost with regard to the
 1  AN INTRODUCTION  27

respective groups, but the idea that one should compensate for losses by
targeting slaves in the New Granadan theater that opened up with the
1819 crossing of the Andes into Boyacá was less than convincing. Bolívar,
Lynch explains, lacked an understanding of economic and social realities,
as New Granada was entirely unlike Venezuela, not having an economy
based on slavery but needing, as Santander argued it did, the slave labor in
question for the mines on the territory’s coast. For Lynch, in Bolívar’s
racialized demographic thinking could be seen another element of Bolívar’s
flawed liberalism—his fear of a revolution of the kind that had occurred in
Haiti, a fear that had little justification but that would remain in evidence
throughout his career, showing up in his continuing concern through the
1820s with the predominance of pardos in the northern coastal region of
Cartagena. Bolívar was apparently unaware that “pardos tended to mirror
the social structure of the whites and to divide into upper and lower
classes.”45
The fact of hierarchies remaining undisturbed is the constant. In a
scene in which Lynch describes the July 10, 1825, assembly in Chuquisaca
(formerly La Plata, and with the founding of Bolivia, Sucre) in Alto Peru,
we learn of a local world in which nothing has changed subsequent to
liberation. Creoles, or individuals of Spanish descent born in the region,
take the place of Spaniards in a rigid social hierarchy of caballeros, cholos,
and indios (gentlemen, mixed race, and Indians) with the members of that
assembly numbering only 40, voted to their seats according to literacy
laws.46 The words cholos and indios were pejorative, as are their inexact
equivalents in English, born of power relations going back to the begin-
ning of colonization. Similarly, Lynch highlights the continuing inequali-
ties in the social order of New Granada ten years after its 1819 liberation,
using Bolívar’s own words to do so:

Colombia remained an aristocratic society, described with great insight by

Bolívar in 1828, when, in a mood of deep pessimism, he spoke of the state
of slavery in which the Colombian lower class still lived, subject to local
mayors and magnates, and denied the human rights to which they were
entitled.47

Finally, as for pardos, Lynch tells us that they found themselves margin-
alized in 1830, facing a reconstructed creole elite that, as seen in the 1830
Venezuelan Constitution, exercised its social and economic hegemony
through, among other strategies, electoral voting requirements.48
28  R. T. CONN

But in Lynch’s critique of the social orders that came into being and his
portrayal of a Bolívar troubled by local power relations that deny individu-
als their human rights, and who stood with and against caudillos or
regional military leaders, Lynch describes the Gran Colombia, the
Federation of the Andes and the Panama Congress such as to harmonize
them with the idea of the nation state. Bolívar’s vision of unity, he affirms,
does not stand against national development or autonomy, but instead is a
way to promote each.
An important scene in the story of the Gran Colombia and the libera-
tion process illustrates his position. It concerns Bolívar’s dispute with
Argentine leader San Martín, the liberator of Río de la Plata, Chile, and
Peru, over Guayaquil in 1822—a moment taken up by many writers and
intellectuals, including the Argentine historian Bartolomé Mitre and the
Cuban writer José Martí, in their efforts at steering and shaping state for-
mation. Lynch presents Bolívar as making a perfectly rational decision
when after San Martín yields to him he refuses to have the general, a vet-
eran of European war who would not—Bolívar felt—take orders from him
easily and who wanted to bring a European prince to the liberated territo-
ries to establish a constitutional monarchy, join forces with him to liberate
southern and eastern Peru. With regard to Guayaquil itself, we are told
that the dispute involved the international legal principle of uti possidetis,
wielded by Bolívar to defend the rights of his Gran Colombia to inherit
the territorial boundaries of the old viceroyalty of New Granada and there-
fore Guayaquil, and the fact that Guayaquil was a site of great military
strategic value that had been a major shipbuilding port in colonial times.49
Bolívar was right to proceed as he did—to take Guayaquil and reject San
Martín’s request, the more capable leader who represented republicanism,
rather than monarchy. Case closed.
Lynch, though, was not through. He returns to Bolívar three decades
later, in 2006, with his celebrated biography, his view of who Bolívar was as a
military leader and an intellectual both tweaked and magnified in response
to Chávez, whose socialist revolution portraying Bolívar as representing
the values and ideas undergirding his government was front and center in
hemispheric politics. We still see the regional military leader who made the
decision to move the theater of war in 1819 from Morillo-controlled
Venezuela to New Granada, who possessed a clear political vision based in
Enlightenment thought, and who cared deeply about equality. But Lynch
now explicitly elevates Bolívar to the world stage, presenting his figure in a
comparative context that places him in the company of the major political
 1  AN INTRODUCTION  29

leaders and thinkers of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centu-

ries. He is a heroic revolutionary who had to master and also yield to
powerful forces not of his own making;50 a democrat who wanted respon-
sible government but who because of his concern about the possibility of
anarchy promoted a political system mediating between the values of lib-
erty and stability; a political philosopher in his own right, comparable to
those of the European Enlightenment, who shared Rousseau’s view that
only the law can be sovereign but who faced challenges Rousseau did not,
writing not for a society that was racially homogeneous or for a single
social class within that society, as Rousseau did (the petit bourgeois) but
for a people with a “special racial formation” and with complex social
inequalities to deal with; a political philosopher, furthermore, who used
his own intellectual resources to fashion “a theory of colonial emancipa-
tion,” something European philosophers of the eighteenth century had
not conceived of doing, self-absorbed as they were in their own polities;51
and a figure whose controversial Gran Colombia, as Lynch now states more
definitively than he does in his 1973 work, makes sense in the context of
the ongoing war against the Spanish. Bolívar needed a state to contain
reaction from within, but it was bound to fall apart, as Bolívar himself
stated, once the military phase was over.52
As for the elites of which he speaks in the 1973 book, Lynch continues
to underline the dominant positions they occupied before their own pop-
ulations at the end of independence, incorporating verbatim certain sec-
tions from that book dealing with Bolívar. The case of Bolivia is of interest.
Lynch details the ways they tried to skirt having to end slavery as man-
dated by Bolívar’s 1826 constitution, which they had asked Bolívar to
write and which they, then, adopted.53 We hear of the 1825 economic
downturn that prevented the banks of Britain from investing in Bolivian
mining, important parts of which had been sold to them by the new
Bolivian government—an unfortunate set of occurrences resulting in this
economic sector lying dormant for decades in a country that would lose its
sea access to Chile as a result of the War of the Pacific (1879–1883).
The point Lynch makes by the book’s end is that posterity has asked
too much of Bolívar. Was it not enough that Bolívar, through his physical
strength and intellectual and propagandistic talents, was able to bring
about liberation? The social issues he sought to resolve, as in the cases of
Colombia and Bolivia, were simply too intractable. Furthermore, without
an absolute turning over of the social classes, how can just one person,
aided though in the case of Bolivia by Sucre, reverse 300 years of history?
30  R. T. CONN

Lynch was tying up loose ends. On the subject of Bolívar’s opposition to

pardocracia and promotion of a racially egalitarian society, Lynch writes:
“The lesson from Haiti was not reassuring.”54 On the subject of the
so-called cult in Venezuela, he states that Bolívar is not the Venezuelan
cult. “Guardian of his own glory, he would have been scornful of any
attempt by his fellow Americans to glorify him. Yet his life, his achieve-
ments, his great battles became embedded in their culture almost as soon
as they happened.”55
Finally, as for Bolívar’s Gran Colombia, Lynch also takes a new posi-
tion. No longer describing it along with Bolívar’s other multinational
projects as unqualifiedly promoting the nation state, Lynch speaks of ten-
sions if not conflicts. He presents the Gran Colombia, as he had before, as
a necessary military strategy to establish international credibility for
Bolívar’s cause and to hold territory, but now states that Bolívar’s occupy-
ing armies at the same time created conditions for nationalism just as the
Spanish colonial system had. Sucre, for example, upon returning to his
wife in Quito in 1828/1829, discovers that his in-laws have been victims
of heavy taxation from the Gran Colombia.56
With Bolívar’s liberation and state projects newly presented by Lynch
against the backdrop of political philosophy, race, social class, economics,
and nation, here was a biography that could educate the world public in
illiberal Bolivarian times. Bolívar was not Venezuela’s or Chávez’s Bolívar.
The late 1960s/early 1970s is one of the key moments in our story
about Bolívar’s afterlife. In addition to Lynch’s The Spanish American
Revolutions, 1808–1826 and Germán Carrera Damas’s The Cult of Bolívar,
there was Uruguayan essayist Eduardo Galeano’s 1971 Las venas abiertas
de América Latina (Open Veins: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent),
which ends with an evocation of Bolívar as visionary.
Published first in Montevideo, then in Mexico City, Open Veins caught
the imagination of millions, going on to see some 75 editions and reprints
in several languages. Traveling to the sites whose history he recounts, par-
ticularly Bolivia and Venezuela, Galeano tells, from the perspective of the
witness, of a centuries-long process that stripped Latin America of its natu-
ral resources—its economic veins always open for exploitation, from mines
in the early centuries of colonization in Potosí to oil in Maracaibo in the
twentieth century—with leaders of different kinds failing time and again to
produce a model of modernization allowing for true development. In the face
of this, and encouraged, perhaps, by the victory of the socialist Salvador
Allende in the 1970 elections in Chile, he urged the citizenries of Latin
America to democratically unseat their governments, his target the alliance
 1  AN INTRODUCTION  31

they had established with the United States and international corporations
in the twentieth century. In the final chapter, in an effort to create a foun-
dation for the Latin America he wants, one in which all countries will share
a similar critical commitment to responsible development, he finds hope
for the future in one of the well-known prophetic places that had been
constructed around Bolívar’s figure, his Gran Colombia that fragments
into multiple states but that holds the promise for the future.57
It was a case of different public spheres. Galeano, from within the long-­
established intellectual and political tradition of reflection on Latin
America in Latin America, was using Bolívar as a platform to bring critical
awareness to his story of administrative neglect and injustice. Allende’s
Chile represented a hope. Galeano was emphasizing the same class divi-
sions and injustices as Lynch was but whereas Lynch understood Bolívar’s
Gran Colombia as a vehicle for the nation state, one through which the
new republics emerged, Galeano saw it as a symbolic moment of pan-
national unity to recuperate.
During this same moment, historian Carrera Damas, with his book El
culto a Bolívar (The Cult of Bolívar), interrogates, as we discussed earlier,
the conditions of public discourse in Venezuela. His politics were no less
progressive than Lynch’s and Galeano’s. Carrera Damas says no to partici-
pating in discussion as mandated, refusing, for instance, to chisel out an
iteration of Bolívar’s figure to support or oppose those of contemporaries
and predecessors. Instead, taking on the entire Venezuelan establishment,
he conceives of a project of dismantling to make way for a new political
language. To be democratic, Venezuela must extirpate its Bolívar cult. But
it was a project that would be difficult to carry out. One example of that
challenge, never mind the challenges he would face later in his opposition
to Chávez, is Ángel Rama’s Ayacucho series itself, funded by the state with
Mijares’s new 1970s vision of a Bolívar reconciled with the 1811 constitu-
tion and democratic thought. The Venezuelan Bolivarian tradition that
John Lynch railed against during his entire life, calling out Vicente Lecuna
in the last pages of his 2006 biography as “the scholarly custodian of the
cult,” continued.58
Lynch had established a new foundation for writing about indepen-
dence and Bolívar, but scholars in the Anglo-American academy in the
1970s and 1980s hardly flocked to the site of independence. Uninterested
in an historical process that had ended, as Lynch concluded, with new and
old social hierarchies in place, they were concerned with other periods of
Latin American history and other issues, the moment itself of the 1960s to
32  R. T. CONN

the 1980s—the Cuban Revolution; Vietnam; the Chilean coup d’état

(supported by the US president Richard Nixon, and his secretary of state,
Henry Kissinger) that toppled democratically elected Salvador Allende
(1970–1973); military dictatorship in Bolivia, Uruguay, Chile, and
Argentina that saw thousands of desaparecidos; and revolution in Central
America that saw the US-directed counter-insurgency war against the
Sandinista government in Nicaragua, the so-called Contra War—occupying
center stage. The world system was the category of the day, a term con-
structed from the Marxist critical tradition designating the unequal eco-
nomic relations that regulated the relationship of Latin America as a
totality to Europe and later the United States.
No book did more to popularize that critical category, also known as
dependency theory, than The Colonial Heritage of Latin America by
Stanley J. Stein, professor of History at Princeton University, and Barbara
H. Stein, published in 1970. The history of Latin America was that of a
region economically subordinated, its dependency, and underdevelop-
ment having roots going back to 1500.59
From the 1970s to the end of the 1980s, Lynch stood relatively alone,
though by his side was a scholar who had come on the scene at the end of
the Pan American period, David Bushnell. Bushnell, throughout his
career, beginning with his 1954 The Santander Regime in Gran Colombia,60
contributed to political and intellectual debates in Colombia, where he
was celebrated for his exacting and rigorous reflections on the contexts of
Bolívar and his Colombian comrade-in-arms, governing partner, and
eventual mortal enemy Francisco de Paula Santander, as well as for his
reflections on the uses to which the two founding fathers were put in
national discourse, this above and beyond the high regard in which he was
held by US-based scholars. When they joined Lynch in the 1990s, schol-
ars, though, moved in a different direction as the collapse of the Soviet
Union and the period of neo-liberalism produced new conditions. They
studied independence not as a process looking forward to the new
­republics—socioeconomic, and racial hierarchies and all—but as one to
understand from the perspective of empire, with empire seen on its own
terms. This was not simply the old but important story of Bourbon
Reforms putting pressure on the Spanish-American colonies and prompt-
ing the Rebellion of Tupac Amaru II of 1780–1782 in the Viceroyalty of
Peru and the Revolt of the Comuneros of 1781 (March–October) in the
Viceroyalty of New Granada but rather a new vision of Spain and its colo-
nies in the global world.
 1  AN INTRODUCTION  33

What each writer did with the category of empire was hardly the same.
In La independencia de la América española (The Independence of Spanish
America), published in Spanish in Mexico City, 1996, then in a revised edi-
tion in English at Cambridge in 1998, University of California/Irvine pro-
fessor Jaime Rodríguez O., the same scholar who reviewed Lynch’s history
in 1976, took up a matter of which we have yet to speak in any detail but
which is of major importance. This was the Spanish Cortes, Spain’s parlia-
ment that during the time of the Napoleonic occupation between 1810
and 1814, when Spanish militias and Britain fought Napoleon on the pen-
insula, and again between 1820 and 1823 had authority over the Spanish
imperial state. In 1812 it produced a charter for a constitutional monarchy.
“[It] was as much an American charter as it was a Spanish one,” Rodríguez
O. writes, one which included representatives from the colonies.61
The Cortes had a long history, going back to medieval times, a proto-­
democratic institution that was later incorporated into monarchical rule
by the Habsburgs and continued as such by the Bourbons. If the Spanish
monarch had been the one who called them, now, with Carlos IV and
Fernando VII under house arrest, Spanish subjects seized that role. The
Cortes occupies an ambiguous place on the map of Spain’s imperial and
colonial crisis. Rodríguez O., who had previously written on Ecuador’s
nineteenth-century leader and president Vicente Rocafuerte (1783–1847)
in a work in which he details Rocafuerte’s connection to the Cortes and
his pro-liberal politics in the Europe and Latin America of the 1820s—a
decade that saw Ecuador go from being under the jurisdiction of Spain to
being under that of the Gran Colombia—with this book undertook to
demonstrate what previous historians of the Americas, including William
Spence Robertson and John Lynch, would not contemplate. The Cortes
for them no more than another political iteration of an empire whose
interests were centered in the metropole.
Comparing the 1812 constitution to that of Great Britain, “the birthplace
of modern representative government,”62 he states that the Spanish
Constitution gave equality of representation to its possessions, which Britain
would never have considered doing. Comparing it also to the constitution of
the United States, he writes that the Cortes was endowed with national sov-
ereignty and ensured mass participation by allowing municipalities with more
than 1000 inhabitants to establish town councils (ayuntamientos) while insti-
tuting no literacy or property requirements for males, with the exception of
those of African ancestry who were not permitted to vote.63 He is telling of
how the Cortes and the 1812 constitution helped create a modern political
34  R. T. CONN

culture for the Americas. Acts of the Cortes and realities in the Americas had
to be reconsidered. First, the Cortes rejected the category of colony that had
been adopted by the Bourbons in the mid-eighteenth century for the
empire’s Latin American possessions, resurrecting that of kingdom deployed
under the Habsburgs and which denoted autonomy for the different regions
of the overseas territories. Second, their decisions were felt in the royalist-
dominated regions of Latin America: Mexico, Peru, Ecuador, Cuba, and
Puerto Rico. About Venezuela, the Río de la Plata, and New Granada, he
writes that in the years between 1810 and 1814 “they had neither elected
representatives to the Cortes nor established provincial deputations and con-
stitutional town councils (ayuntamientos).”64 Having limited experience
with representative government, they “lacked a clear sense of their options.”65
Things could not have been more different in the regions of the empire
where its actas circulated and where Spanish-American autonomists, eager to
participate in the new imperial democratic republican government, voted
representatives to it and to the new ayuntamientos in Latin America.66
But Rodríguez O. tells us that the phenomenon of participation
described does not begin with the new imperial constitutional government
of 1812. If Spanish Americans located in royalist areas embraced the
Cortes, there was a reason it resonated. Colonial subjects had long enjoyed
a political life through Spanish-American institutions, namely the imperial
courts called Las audiencias where for more than a century and a half the
Crown sold seats to creoles.67 Few have spoken of this practice as a legiti-
mate form of representation, but Rodríguez O. is desirous of challenging
the commonly drawn distinction between Spanish-American colonials
who do not participate in government and British American colonials who
do, a distinction repeatedly made by Bolívar who speaks of a Spanish
America unprepared for republicanism. In doing so, he suggests an expla-
nation for why the relative political autonomy he is recuperating has not
been clear to view. The reason has to do with the Bourbons. If the
Bourbons applied pressure to the colonies in the second half of the eigh-
teenth century by levying higher taxes and creating stricter controls
through the intendencias they put in place that centralized authority, incit-
ing the famous rebellions of which we know, the top-down centralization
framework they instituted had another effect in addition to that of revolt.
That was to cover over the history of agency of colonial subjects concerned
with having representation in the empire under the previous royal house of
the Habsburgs. With this, Rodríguez O. provides a vision of the political
realm in colonial society that is to be understood as complementing
 1  AN INTRODUCTION  35

Lynch’s vision of the economic, detailed at the beginning of The Spanish

American Revolutions, 1808–1826.
In these pages Lynch tells of how the colonies under the Habsburgs
were able to establish economic worlds independent of the parent state, a
reality the Bourbons later sought to reverse in their efforts at making the
empire more profitable for Madrid, a move that Lynch calls the “second
conquest.”68
As part of his effort to overcome divisions between the metropole and
its colonies, Rodríguez O. likens Spanish liberals to Latin American royal-
ists, their enemy being the same: absolute monarchy. To this end, he draws
parallels between a rebellion in the province of Galicia, Spain to statements
of support for the Cortes and Fernando VII in the regions of Latin
America. Liberals in Spain and so-called loyalists in Spanish America were
part of a single process of critique and reform within the empire, all seeing
their universal rights in the institution in question and the sequestered
king. Rodríguez O. maintains that Spanish-American royalists possessed a
clear ideological vision defined by allegiance to the Cortes and that they
understood the Bourbon monarch Fernando VII to whom the Cortes had
pledged allegiance as an extension of themselves, a figure who in their
minds represented not monarchy but constitutional monarchy. Bolívar is a
central part of that story.
Rodríguez O. presents the rise of Bolívar’s figure in 1816 and 1817
not only in relation to circumstances in northeastern Venezuela with cau-
dillos (populist military leaders) vying with one another for authority over
the independence process, but also in connection to Fernando VII who
upon his return as monarch in February of 1814 demonstrates that he is
not the leader loyalists had thought he was. He brutally reconquers the
territories of northern South America and Mexico that had been won by
independentists. He also dissolves the Cádiz Cortes that had made loyalty
to him an element of the assembly’s identity. In the face of that reality,
Venezuelan loyalist creoles engaged in civil war with independentist cre-
oles since 1811 change allegiances, rejecting Fernando VII, not the
Cortes, not the liberal constitutionalist moment. Much follows as
Rodríguez O. fills the remainder of his narrative with events of 1816–1820
and then the decade of the 1820s related to Bolívar. In the political void
left by the failure of Spain’s liberal tradition to take hold in Venezuela,
Bolívar is said to become increasingly dictatorial in nature, his political
vision defined by no more than his mistrust of others and his sole belief in
36  R. T. CONN

himself. About the British-inspired constitution he recommends in his

1819 Angostura Address, Rodríguez O. states that Bolívar would have
been better off recommending the Spanish 1812 constitution with its
sovereign legislature.
The historical moment in which Rodríguez O. produced his narrative
is significant. These were the neo-liberal years of the 1990s, a decade in
which the model of socialism had lost prestige and in which economic
elites were brandishing the idea of capitalism and republican forms of gov-
ernment as the sole path forward. For Rodríguez O., Spanish-American
countries need not look upon their liberal political past as one influenced
exclusively by models from France, the United States, and Great Britain.
He asserts that they can also find their liberal tradition at home, in their
own colonial histories, as well as in their engagement with the Cortes,
which made those that entered into dialogue with them aware of their
rights to representation and gave them a structure of government.
Rodríguez O., who focuses most of his attention on Mexico, centers
Mexico in the hemisphere, referring to it as America Septentrional (north-
ern America) while displacing the United States, which is erased from
view. A constitution that was as good as, if not better than, that of Britain
and the United States was key in defining areas of political culture of
Latin America.
Mexico, which he refers to as Septentrional America (Northern
America), thereby displacing the United States, is central for his narrative.
Rodríguez O. tells us that in 1821, the year of the country’s indepen-
dence, it is the 1812 constitution that is used to model the constitution of
the new state. The Tratados de Córdoba (the Treaty of Córdoba) called
for the conservative war hero who turned independentist Agustín de
Iturbide or a member of his family to be made emperor in the event
Fernando VII did not accept to be monarch or no royal house agreed to
appoint one. Iturbide, we are told, is made emperor by the military, not
the people, for which reason he falls rapidly from power. Mexicans in their
engagement with the Cortes between 1810 and 1814 and again in 1820
had become ever so conscious of their rights.69 Iturbide steps down not
because of his own excesses but because a contract has been broken with
the people.70
Historian Jeremy Adelman, professor at Princeton University,
approaches the category of empire with a different focus in his 2006 book
on the colonial merchant guilds and their relationship to empire and
 1  AN INTRODUCTION  37

nation between the 1770s and 1830, Sovereignty and Revolution in the
Iberian Atlantic. Hardly concerned to recuperate a modern tradition in
Spain defined by the protagonism of the Cortes and the constitutional
monarchy declared by it, Adelman creates a new economic and political
history to explain change and upheaval, one centered on the colonial mer-
chants of the period, the key players, he asserts, in the destiny of an empire
at a crossroads. Dipping into the wellspring that is Bolívar as well as into
the narratives associated with him to make his argument, Adelman focuses
on the merchants against a backdrop in which Bolívar unobtrusively
appears as liberator and constitutionalist who follows Rousseau’s dictum
of civic virtue but who also possesses a far-flung conception of sovereignty.
Resolving the dispute over Bolívar’s legacy in this manner, he details the
local and international economic forces in the Atlantic driving the mer-
chants now to remain loyal to the Spanish empire, now to exit from it.
Social and political fragmentation eventually overwhelms the former
Spanish colonies in a context in which colonial subjects have no traditions
to return to. But Adelman does not moralize about that fragmentation
and/or celebrate Bolívar as rising above it. He carefully steers a path
around the discursive sites of national and hemispheric debate where
Bolívar commonly stands positively in opposition to other figures or for
virtuous social values. In the Angostura Address Bolívar promotes racial
equality and unity but Adelman recalls a text written by him at the end of
his life identifying Latin America’s racial diversity as the obstacle to the
possibility of the region’s progress. Forget the common lament made
from the normative space of a desired unity. When they declare their sov-
ereignty, cities in New Granada, like provinces in the Río de la Plata, sim-
ply follow the law of secession unleashed by the weakening of the empire,
recalcitrant to the idea of subordinating themselves to anything greater
than their own visible political selves.
But the dissolution of the imperial system, together with the logic of
secession it unleashes, is not inevitable, Adelman maintains. Colonial mer-
chants, in the context of changing conditions in Spain, hold the key to
whether the empire will remain whole though changed or whether it will
fall apart. In the strict sequential story of events he tells, with everything
riding on these economic actors—who are not autonomous, dependent
on forces around them—Adelman underlines that the ideology of
­separation from Spain that is commonly spoken of does not get produced
until after the merchants are cut off from control of markets.71
38  R. T. CONN

The story goes something like this: In the 1790s, and then again in the
first decade of the 1800s, French and British domination of the seas per-
mit colonial merchants to secure the right to open trade denied them by
the peninsular guilds of Cádiz. Free of Spain’s restrictions in this period,
they conceive of new commercial alliances, becoming interested in agricul-
ture as a source of wealth rather than, as mandated for 300 years, precious
metals, with writers taking their cue from them to produce the new
reformist doctrine of the times.72
The height of their power is 1810. With British control over commerce
in South America and with Spain recognizing its dependency on colonial
merchants for financial support for their treasury, merchants are able to
sell to Britain and thus serve as a rich and significant resource for the local
governments and the militias that will vie for power in the years ahead.
Adelman is concerned to explain the allegiances of the members of this
class, some plantation owners themselves, just as Rodríguez O. is to under-
stand those of Spanish Americans taken as a whole. He tells of how these
actors on the cusp of moving the Latin American economy away from
mining to agriculture begin to turn against the First Republic in the
moment that it declares the abolition of slavery and then do so definitively
when Francisco de Miranda, the Venezuelan military leader and politico
who had been brought back from his exile in London in 1811 to lead the
republic, offers freedom to slaves who join his troops. Feeling betrayed by
their representatives and the storied military leader in this way, merchants
stop sending money to the confederation’s coffers, directing it instead to
royalist militias and remaining loyalist through the short-lived First and
Second Republics, the latter led by Bolívar. If, as Adelman tells us, they
cheer when Bolívar is routed and driven from Caracas in August of 1814,73
they will slowly switch sides in reaction to Fernando VII, who, subsequent
to his return from French captivity, re-erects the Cádiz guild-controlled
colonial economy.
Adelman makes no mention to Fernando VII’s closure of the Cortes in
Cádiz though he does credit the Cortes’ decision in 1810 to allow freedom
of the press in the colonies with creating a new public sphere defined by the
category of public opinion, the ideas that move the public sphere no longer
restricted to the cabildos (the colonial town councils) and other elite circles.74
The act, Adelman states, was a bid for loyalty, but it was one that in the end
backfired as the independentist position gained the upper hand in the new
press. What is important in Adelman’s narrative are the forces of disintegra-
tion and secession now let loose, with Fernando VII’s specific decision not
 1  AN INTRODUCTION  39

to allow the colonial merchant guilds to hold on to their recently won pre-
rogative. This was the determining factor in a process of unraveling that
would simultaneously spawn new ideologies of sovereignty, including even-
tually Bolívar’s Gran Colombia and Federation of the Andes, visions that
stand against the logic of localism and secession.
In Adelman’s history in which frequently-used framing binaries are
canceled out by the law of secession, Adelman offers intriguing readings of
familiar scenes. No better example of this is his portrayal of the well-known
epilogue to the First Republic involving Francisco de Miranda and Bolívar.
Adelman submits that Miranda, who ends up in a Cádiz dungeon, dying
there in 1816, is betrayed not by Bolívar, as is usually said,75 but by royal-
ists with whom he had originally established the armistice and who, mak-
ing a new deal with the Spanish, suddenly prevent him from joining the
flotilla with its escort of British vessels he had arranged. There is no discus-
sion of the Miranda who gives up the struggle too early by negotiating an
armistice and who is betrayed as a result by a Bolívar who questions his
leadership, or who issues a defense of his decision to surrender, stating that
American colonials are inferior soldiers in comparison to European sol-
diers. We are provided instead with the image of a realist and statesman
who, in striking a deal with royalists, sought to preserve “what precious
‘civil liberty’ survived” and to save the lives of his allies. For Adelman,
Miranda saw the big picture when it came to the reality of commerce, life,
and society.76 In the armistice he negotiated, he is an unsung hero.
Rodríguez O. takes a different view of the scene. Keeping the betrayal
intact while focusing on Bolívar as the decision-maker instead of Miranda,
he produces a new story. He submits that Bolívar acted because Miranda
failed to inform the leaders under him of the reason for his capitulation.
He presents Bolívar as a fickle young officer concerned first and foremost
for himself, stating that he had intended to go with the British to fight the
French on the Peninsula but changed his mind when he learned that “his
vast wealth had been confiscated” by the Spanish general, Domingo de
Monteverde. Rather than the Bolívar committed to liberate Spanish
America from the moment of August 15, 1805, when legend has it he
made his oath before his mentor, Simón Rodríguez, on l’Aventino, one of
Italy’s Montes Sacros (Sacred Mountains), Rodríguez O. portrays Bolívar
as one who only at this moment definitively turns against the Spanish,
motivated by the desire to recover his wealth. The version of the scene is
taken from the work of the US historian William Spence Robertson77 of
whom we have already spoken. Rodríguez O. deploys it differently, not to
40  R. T. CONN

accentuate how dedicated Bolívar has become to the cause of liberation, as

Robertson does, but to cast aspersions on Bolívar by stating that his moti-
vation is only venal. All of which comes directly after Rodríguez O.’s nar-
rative about the First Republic. In contrast to Adelman, who sees the First
Republic as “an unholy alliance of different groups,” emphasizing the fact
of its name, “The American Confederation of Venezuela,” Rodríguez O.
celebrates the moment as the first representative government in Latin
America and as an extraordinary example of widespread political participa-
tion. What brings the confederation down is Miranda’s decision to arrest
all Spaniards and to recruit slaves with the guarantee of freedom in ten
years. The ill-conceived decision, born of a doctrinaire, works to the
advantage of royalists. The archbishop of Caracas has his clergy recruit
blacks, both free and slave, so that they define their allegiances in favor of
the empire. There are other effects. As new lower-class isleno Spaniards
arrive at the time, they, too, become royalist, developing this allegiance in
the social web they form with blacks, not with upper-class whites. Pardos,
for this reason, come to control eastern Venezuela, we are told.78 In the
end, Rodríguez O. is establishing deep roots for royalism, ones that make
Fernando VII’s rejection of the Cortes all the more dramatic for a popula-
tion that has had a powerful though short-lived experience with represen-
tative government and that is prepared to form part of the constitutional
monarchy proclaimed by the Cortes.
Historian John Elliott, professor emeritus at the University of Oxford,
brought out his volume Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in
America, 1492–1830 also in 2006, a work in which he tells the stories of
British and Spanish America side-by-side with a view to the matter of impe-
rial organization, political tradition, race relations, and capitalism. In the last
section, Elliott compares Bolívar and the other liberators of Spanish America
to the leaders of independence in North America. With Bolívar more than
just one more liberator, but in fact a model for Latin American indepen-
dence, the year of his death coinciding with the end of his narrative, he sets
out to show why Spanish America and the United States do not look alike
when it comes to their respective independence movements and republics.
Elliott poses and answers a series of questions, such as: Why were the lengths
of time of the movements different, in the one case, 1775–1783, and in the
other, 1809–1825? In the British north there was only the east coast to
liberate; in the Spanish south an entire continent. How does one explain the
difference in the types of leaders? Leaders of the colonies were aided by the
French and the Spanish states; those of Spanish America received no assis-
 1  AN INTRODUCTION  41

tance from any foreign state, having only their personal resources to rely on.
Why did race not become important in the one conflict and did in the other?
The British did not arm Indians or blacks for fear of alienating whites whom
they wanted to return to the fold; in Venezuela both royalists and patriots in
the course of civil war armed slaves.
The big question Elliott asks is why a federated state, meaning a large
self-governing union with power divided between central and regional
government, emerged in British America and not in Spanish America.
Colonial leaders developed strong personal relations among themselves in
Philadelphia and from 1776 forward acted as members of the confeder-
ated Thirteen Colonies. In contrast, the Spanish-American colonial lead-
ers mostly did not know one another, never mind form part of one large
political entity in formation. In addition, they could not overcome
300 years of colonial history that saw regions under the Spanish imperial
system develop differently from one another despite sharing the Spanish
language and Hispanic culture, commonalities hardly sufficient, says
Elliott, to serve as a foundation for a large state, whether it was Bolívar’s
Gran Colombia, 1821–1831, or the Federation of United Provinces of
Central America, 1823–1839. There are additional questions. Why did
the Spanish-American republics adopt US-inspired constitutions, but have
no sense of patria to guide them? The traditional elites had been able to
remain in control, or failing this because of internal fighting, had been
replaced by caudillos. How did British and Spanish America experience
representative government? British America had a strong tradition of self-­
government in the colonial order; Spanish America’s extremely limited
experience with this form of government consisted of the ayuntamientos
(town halls), introduced in the late eighteenth century by the Bourbons in
order to get around the political fiefdoms of colonial elites, and of devel-
opments related to the 1812 constitution modeled on Britain’s constitu-
tional monarchy, which afforded a limited number of colonists the
possibility of learning about parliamentary rule.79 Unlike Rodríguez O.,
Elliott does not tell of a representative government predating the Cortes
in the Americas, nor does he celebrate the Cortes. Rather, he speaks of
piecemeal acts that could be seen as having material effects on Spanish
Americans’ ability to practice representative government.80 What, then,
are the ideological origins of Spanish-American representative institutions?
They are French and US notions of popular sovereignty as assimilated by
creoles who applied them to the institutions they inherited from the
Spanish imperial system.81
42  R. T. CONN

Finally, we need to put clearly how Elliott regards Bolívar in the context
of the two narratives of which we have been speaking: independence, on the
one hand, and the Gran Colombia and his Federation of the Andes, on the
other. With regard to the first narrative, far from criticizing Bolívar, he
defends him. Elliott justifies Bolívar’s War to the Death promulgated on
June 15, 1813, in Trujillo, Venezuela, as necessary for the reason that the
royalist army under the command of Domingo de Monteverde was exces-
sively violent. Concerning Bolívar’s leadership abilities, Elliott praises him
and the other Spanish-American military leaders for the wide culture they
possessed. Bolívar, as we have already said, is in fact a model. The Mexican
leader Agustín Jerónimo de Iturbide, who achieved independence through
a negotiation with Spain’s Liberal constitutional government in 1821, and
whose son joined the Venezuelan leader in 1827, is, Elliott writes, no
Bolívar. On the subject of the second narrative, Bolívar’s vision of a large
state, Elliott speaks of the social ethics driving Bolívar’s vision and of the
model of political organization circulating in Europe and the historical
moment. On the one hand, he presents Bolívar’s project as being under-
standable as Bolívar was concerned to contain entrenched local economic
elites that were repositioning themselves to control their respective regions.
On the other, and most importantly, he offers that Bolívar was not imposing
a personal vision on a continent but simply acting in accordance with one of
the new ideas of the Enlightenment age—federalism, meaning a large state
with limited regional self-­government within that state. Elliott, too, was
taking a position on the narrative of independence and that of the Gran
Colombia or Federation of the Andes.82

Bolívar and State Formation

If Lynch, Rodríguez O., Adelman, and Elliott assess the role of Bolívar in
the context of the breakup of the Spanish empire and the drive to auton-
omy and separation, producing histories in which the narrative of inde-
pendence and that of the Gran Colombia are carefully distinguished from
each other, with the Gran Colombia presented either as an essential part
of a military strategy to build union across territories susceptible to the
stoking of division (Lynch), as a reflection of Bolívar’s dictatorial impulses
(Rodríguez O.), as an example of the dreams of sovereignty unleashed by
the dissolution of the empire (Adelman), or as originating in the intellec-
tual currents of the times (Elliott), we address that other story, the one
that their important work could have the effect of relegating to the past
but that has its own complex history that continues today.
 1  AN INTRODUCTION  43

This is the story of how actors over the past two centuries have engaged
with Bolívar and the twin narratives of independence and the Gran
Colombia, as well as the related one of the Federation of the Andes
together with the Bolivian Constitution, to articulate and support their
political visions. Here is one of the central invented traditions of the
Americas but which has existed for us only in a fragmentary way, the indi-
vidual public spheres of the hemisphere in which Bolívar’s figure has been
an object of discourse still not aptly narrated and the connections between
those spheres completely unknown.
From scholarship in the post-Pan American Anglo-American tradition
that would have our story be nothing more than a prehistory of interest
for documentary purposes, a case of unreflective patriot writing bearing
perhaps the mark of an obsession, as it has for certain US-based actors, or
one vast, undifferentiated ideological morass, better seen as a kind of
interpretive free-for-all, we recover nine national histories, all intercon-
nected by way of Venezuela and the United States, and also, by the matter
of the twin narratives of which we have been speaking.
We begin with the Venezuelan story because it is the most significant of
all the national Bolivarian traditions on account of its internal organization
and its influence. The hemispheric map of Latin American Letters and
cultural discourse changes from period to period. From the mid-­nineteenth
century through the 1970s, Venezuelan intellectuals, many historians and
prominent essayists whose writings were read across the Americas and
Europe, defined that map in significant ways. Our interest lies in seeing
how they used Bolívar as a platform to define their positions on liberalism
and authoritarianism, race and class hegemony, and hemispheric politics,
and also to see how their work has connected to that of their counterparts
elsewhere in the Americas and in Europe. To comprehend this, we need to
understand clearly the range of choices for understanding Bolívar’s figure
that were before them, Venezuelan political and intellectual history, and
their own stories, which included exile and/or extended stints abroad as
diplomats and visiting professors. Chapter 3 focuses on Felipe Larrazábal
(1816–1873); Chap. 5 on José Gil Fortoul (1861–1943) and Laureano
Vallenilla Lanz (1870–1936); Chap. 6 on Rufino Blanco Fombona
(1874–1944); Chap. 7 on Vicente Lecuna (1870–1954) and the Bolivarian
Society; and Chap. 8 on Mariano Picón Salas (1901–1965), Germán
Carrera Damas (1930–), and Luis Castro Leiva (1943–1999).
We lodge the chapter on Cuban intellectual José Martí (1853–1895),
Chap. 4, among those on Venezuela for a reason. We are interested in
exploring Martí’s connections to Venezuela and its exilic community.
44  R. T. CONN

Martí became something of a Venezuelan cultural insider. He also was

aware of scholars at large who were writing on his figure, including the
German Georg Gottfried Gervinus.83 Martí has often been paired with
Bolívar as a likeminded intellectual, but Martí engaged in a serious manner
with Bolívar’s acts and his writings, taking a position on different moments
in the narrative of independence and that of the state. Perhaps the greatest
sign that Martí was a cultural insider was his knowledge that Bolívar was a
mantuano, a vision of his figure that became important for his October
28, 1893, address entitled “Bolívar.”
In Chaps. 9, 10, and 11 we consider the circulation of Bolívar’s figure in
the United States. The time period we focus on is that of Pan Americanism
(1889–1950s), but particularly, that of the Pan American Union
(1910–1948) with its building on the Ellipse behind the White House (now
the location of the Organization of American States), and with Brazil a
prominent member; its 21-member state governing board presided over by
the US secretary of state; and its English-, Spanish-, and Portuguese-
language monthly bulletin that meticulously recorded the United States’
efforts to duplicate and synchronize civil society, commerce, government,
science, and the arts across the hemisphere. The Pan American Union’s bul-
letin contains entries for the comings and goings of board members and the
elections of new presidents, including that of Pascual Ortiz Rubio, invited
by President Herbert Hoover to visit Washington, D.C., in December of
1929, with the February 1930 issue running on its first two pages his bio.84
The many who wrote on his figure from within the context of Pan
Americanism in the second Bolívar craze in the United States, one which
saw his figure taught in US schools—the first to be described later—
included scholars, public intellectuals, officials, and statesmen, actors
who were not only from the United States, but also from Latin America
and Europe, and who all participated in the Pan American Union’s
intellectual project of constituting the Americas as an object for hemi-
spheric consumption. An important aspect of this world was the state
alliance between Venezuela and the United States that lasted a century,
1908–1999.
In Chap. 12, we address the Colombian tradition, which has revolved
around the figures of Francisco de Paula Santander and Bolívar, the two
constituting dueling symbolic sites in the nation’s political life. Colombia
has never used Bolívar as a cultural ambassador in the way Venezuela has,
nor has it deployed his figure to establish in the particular case of the
 1  AN INTRODUCTION  45

United States a cultural alliance, though it has established other kinds of

alliances with the power to the north, particularly military, just as Venezuela
has. This is important with regard to Colombian historian and writer,
Germán Arciniegas, who in the United States, where he spent many years,
was in a sense odd man out. The Venezuelan-US American view of his
figure had long been the one that was dominant. His 1984 tome, Bolívar
y la revolución (Bolívar and the Revolution), a critique of Bolívar which he
published just a year after the decision of the Organization of the American
States to name its meeting hall for his figure—an initiative of the Latin
American member states—is consistent with his own longstanding politi-
cal vision.85
Chapter 13 addresses the Ecuadorian Bolivarian tradition, which is
based on the twin figures of Bolívar and Antonio José de Sucre and is
linked in important ways to cultural and political processes in Colombia
and Venezuela, countries with which Ecuador once formed a union, the
Gran Colombia. The tradition has its roots in the ideological work per-
formed by the country’s first president Juan José Flores, a Venezuelan
general who served under Bolívar, and in the political fallout from the
assassination of the much-admired Sucre, considered the heir apparent to
Bolívar, on June 4, 1830, five and a half months before the death of
Bolívar. Interest in the circumstances of the Sucre assassination endured
through the first decades of the twentieth century. In the nineteenth cen-
tury it was stoked by the likes of Juan Montalvo, who from his exile in
New Granada accused Flores as a likely conspirator, this in his effort to
attack the country’s political tradition, particularly the president Gabriel
García Moreno. In the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it was kept
alive by historian Roberto Andrade, one of García Moreno’s assassins who
had gone on to be a prominent Ecuadorian intellectual.
In Chap. 14, we focus on a 1939 screenplay about Bolívar written by
the famous Mexican intellectual José Vasconcelos of whom we have already
spoken. This chapter is like the earlier one on José Martí in that it deals
with a towering Latin American figure in relationship to both Venezuela
and the United States. We read the screenplay in the context of the Pan
American Union in the United States—together with the systems of rep-
resentation it forged—and the Venezuelan Bolivarian tradition. The latter
is the place from which Vasconcelos draws for the purpose of retelling a
“hero’s” story in order to take a position on Mexican politics; Mexican-US
relations; and Franco, Hitler, and Mussolini in Europe.
46  R. T. CONN

Chapter 15 explores Bolivia’s Bolivarian tradition, forged on the axis of

the Bolívar-Sucre binary in a way similar to Ecuador. Bolivian actors have
waged their ideological debates about the direction of the nation by laying
claim to the legacies of both figures, with Sucre the site of the liberal tradi-
tion forged in the first decades of the twentieth century. In later decades,
Bolivian actors resurrected Bolívar in dialogue with Venezuelan and
US-Pan American renderings of his figure, a process extending from the
times of the Pan American Union to those of the Organization of
American States.
Chapter 16 centers on two major Peruvian figures. Ricardo Palma was
a widely read satirist who was well aware of Venezuela’s acts to monumen-
talize Bolívar’s figure in the 1870s and 1880s. Statesman and essayist
Víctor Andrés Belaúnde was a signatory to the United Nations charter.
Palma came upon Bolívar in the nineteenth century through Peruvian and
Latin American debates about his figure; Belaúnde did so in the context of
the rediscovery of Bolívar’s figure at the turn of the century in Peru, and
later in the context of his 1920’s sojourn in the United States, when he
began to write on Bolívar’s figure differently from how he had previously.
Motivated by the phenomenon of interest in Bolívar, he created a Latin
American vision of liberalism to compete with that of the Pan American
Union and with that of the Venezuelan historian Laureano Vallenilla Lanz,
a major actor of the times.
Lastly, in Chap. 17, we examine the cultural work produced about San
Martín in Argentina, and more generally, the Río de la Plata, looking at
how Bolívar has served it as a kind of “Other.” The chapter has two goals:
first, to come full circle by studying the establishment of a symbolic world
that runs parallel to that of the Venezuelan; second, to focus again on the
US-based Bolivarian tradition, tracing the ways in which figures in
Argentina and Uruguay respond to it at the same time that they respond
to the Venezuelan.

Notes
1. Gabriel García Márquez, translation Edith Grossman, The General in His
Labyrinth (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), 42.
2. Letter to José Antonio Paéz from Bucaramanga at the time the Ocaña
Congress is in session, April 12, 1828, in Simón Bolívar: Doctrina del
Libertador (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1994), 225. “Mucho sacrificio
haré en someterme a la voluntad general legalmente expresada, mas de nin-
 1  AN INTRODUCTION  47

guna manera aceptaré ni aun el título de ciudadano en un país mal consti-

tuido y por consiguiente discorde y débil.” “I will make many sacrifices in
submitting to the general will but I will never accept even the title of citizen
in a country badly constituted and for that reason discordant and weak.”
“No quieren creer los demagogos que la práctica de la libertad no se sos-
tiene sino con virtudes y que donde éstas reinan es impotente la tiranía.”
“The demagogues do not want to believe that the practice of liberty can only
be sustained with virtues and that where these prevail tyranny is impotent.”
3. Alberto Arvelo, director, Libertador (Venezuela/Spain: Producciones
Insurgentes, San Mateo Films, WNG Films, and Silver Screen Inc., 2013).
4. Jorge Luis Borges, “Guayaquil” in El informe de Brodie (Buenos Aires:
Emecé, 1970).
5. Germán Carrera Damas, El culto a Bolívar (Caracas: Alfadil Ediciones,
2003), 310. The first edition of the book appeared in 1969 in Caracas at
the Instituto de Antropología e Historia, Universidad Central de Venezuela.
I am citing from the fifth edition.
6. Ibid., 308–310.
7. Ibid., 357.
8. José Martí, “Cecilio Acosta” in José Martí: Nuestra América (Barcelona:
Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1985) (Revista Venezolana, Caracas, July 15, 1881).
9. For an account of Neruda’s role in saving the lives of Spanish refugees, see
Ariel Dorfman, 2018, “A Lesson on Immigration from Pablo Neruda”
(New York Times, Feb. 21, Op-Ed).
10. See Neruda’s Un canto para Bolívar (México, D.F.: Impr. Universitaria, 1941).
11. Homenaje a Bolívar en el primer centenario de su muerte, 1830–1930
(Mexico: Secretaria de Relaciones Exteriores, 1931).
12. Gustavo Vargas Martínez, “Presencia de Bolívar en la cultura Mexicana”
(México, D.F.: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2005), 71.
Vargas Martínez provides a history of the representations of Bolívar in
paintings and in the plastic arts more generally from the 1920s to 1998. In
this context he includes information about the Monteverde mural that was
ordered by Vasconcelos.
13. Carmen Galindo and Magdalena Galindo, Mexico City “Historic Center”
(Mexico City: Ediciones Nueva Guía S.A. de C.V., 2002). See also the fol-
lowing website, accessed June 27, 2018: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
San_Ildefonso_College.
14. For more on the 1920s and the importance of Bolívar’s figure, see Brice
Calsapeu Losfeld, “México en la revista El Libertador (1925–1929): ¿una
visión a geometrá variable?” in Diplomacia oficiosa, representaciones y redes
extraoficiales en la historia de América Latina: un homenaje a la trayectoria
académica de Salvador E.  Morales Pérez (1939–2012). Herrera León,
Fabian. Ed. (Morelia, Michoacán: Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás
de Hidalgo, 2015).
48  R. T. CONN

15. Ángel Rama, The Lettered City, translated by John Charles Chasteen
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 41.
16. I have this information from Arcadio Díaz Quiñones, who attended the
meeting as the scholar from Puerto Rico. Rama told him of the funding
source in one of their conversations at the time. I thank Arcadio Díaz
Quiñones not only for this information but also for his extraordinary gen-
erosity in bringing to my attention the documents presented by Rama at
the meeting, “Guía de temas generales” and “Biblioteca Americana.” He
also made me aware of the announcement in the November 17, 1975,
issue of the Caracas newspaper El universal publicizing the meeting and
the names of the participants.
17. “Encuentro de escritores e investigadores de la cultura latinoamericaa. 17
al 21 de noviembre de 1975,” Caracas, El Universal (Princeton University
Library, Princeton, NJ: Arcadio Díaz Quiñones Papers). Following are the
names of the participants listed in the announcement (I have added the
country of origin): Fernando Alegría (Peru), Enrique Anderson Imbergt
(Argentina), Juan Bosch (Dominican Republic), Benjamín Carrión
(Ecuador), Augusto Céspedes (Bolivia), J.  G. Cobo Borda (Colombia),
Arcadio Díaz Quiñones (Puerto Rico), Adriano González León
(Venezuela), Rafael Gutiérrez Girardot (Colombia), Pedro Grases
(Venezuela), Tulio Halperín Donghi (Argentina), Noé Jitrik (Argentina),
Juan Liscano (Venezuela), Italo López Vallecillos (El Salvador), Antonio
Candido de Mello e Souza (Brazil), Domingo Miliani (Venezuela),
Rodrigo Miró (Panama), José Miguel Oviedo (Peru), José Emilio Pacheco
(Mexico), Caio Prado Junior (Brazil), Sergio Ramírez (Nicaragua), Carlos
Real de Azúa (Uruguay), Augusto Roa Bastos (Paraguay), Gonzalo Rojas
(Chile), Ernesto Sábato (Chile), Luis Alberto Sánchez (Peru), Leopoldo
Zea (Mexico).
18. Ángel Rama, “Guía de temas generales,” 1975 (Princeton University
Library, Princeton, NJ: Arcadio Díaz Quiñones Papers).
19. See Arcadio Díaz Quiñones on Rama’s admiration for Reyes and Henríquez
Ureña and the inspiration the two figures would have provided for the
Ayacucho project in Sobre los principios: los intelectuales caribeños y la
tradición (Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, 2006), 54–55. See also
Rafael Madragón on the notion of libraries as a form of cultural interven-
tion. “La memoria como biblioteca. Pedro Henríquez Ureña y la Biblioteca
Americana” in Políticas y estrategias de la crítica: ideología, historia y actores
de los estudios literarios, Sergio Ugalde Quintana y Ottmar Ette eds.
(Madrid: Iberoamericana-Vervuert, 2016). In addition, see Fernando
Degiovanni on the use of the biblioteca/collection in the case of the
Argentine intellectuals Ricardo Rojas and José Ingenieros, Textos de la
patria: nacionalismo, políticas culturales y canon en Argentina (Rosario:
Beatriz Viterbo Editora, 2007).
 1  AN INTRODUCTION  49

20. Rafael Madragón, “La memoria como biblioteca. Pedro Henríquez Ureña
y la Biblioteca Americana” in Políticas y estrategias de la crítica: ideología,
historia y actores de los estudios literarios, Sergio Ugalde Quintana y Ottmar
Ette, eds. (Madrid: Iberoamericana-Vervuert, 2016), 197–198.
21. “Encuentro de escritores e investigadores de la cultura latinoamericana. 17
al 21 de noviembre de 1975. Biblioteca Americana. Autor: Pedro
Henríquez Ureña” (Princeton University Library, Princeton, N.J.: Arcadio
Díaz Quiñones Papers).
22. Simón Bolívar, prologue Augusto Mijares, and Manuel Pérez Vila, ed., Simón
Bolívar: doctrina del Libertador (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1976).
23. See Fernando Degiovanni, Vernacular Latin Americanisms: war, the mar-
ket, and the making of a discipline (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh
Press, 2018). Degiovanni speaks of the importance of reading the volumes
of the Fundación Biblioteca Ayacucho Series in accordance with the teams
of scholars who produced them.
24. Ibid. See Mijares’s prologue, “Bolívar como político y como reformador
social,” xiv–xvi.
25. Judith N.  Shklar, Men and Citizens: A Study of Rousseau’s Social Theory
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 18–19.
26. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile or on Education, Introduction, translation
and notes by Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 99.
27. See Mijares’s prologue. Simón Bolívar, prologue Augusto Mijares, and
Manuel Pérez Vila, ed., Simón Bolívar: doctrina del Libertador (Caracas:
Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1976). “Y fue que, obsesionados los que hicieron
nuestra primera constitución, en 1811, por el temor de que la República
sucumbiera bajo el despotismo unipersonal—como había sucedido en
Francia con Napoleon—o que el gobierno deliberativo cediera ante el pres-
tigio de los caudillos, como ya podia temerse en la América Hispana, se
empeñaron en rodear de trabas de toda clase el Poder Ejecutivo.” “And
being as it was that those who made our first Constitution, in 1811, were
obsessed by fear that the Republic would succumb under the weight of a
uni-personal despotism—as had occurred in France with Napoleon—or
that deliberative government would give way in the face of the prestige of
the caudillos as could already be feared in Hispanic America, they insisted
on protecting the Executive Branch with all kinds of obstacles.”
28. Ibid., xxvi. “Y podrá imaginar cuánto tino, cuánta paciencia y cuánto valor
moral necesitó el Libertador para enfrentar o soslayar aquella presión con-
stante.” “And one can imagine how much sound judgment, how much
patience, how much moral courage the Liberator needed to either con-
front or dodge that constant pressure.”
29. For a critical account of Simón Rodríguez’s pedagogical project in Bolivia
in relation to similarly innovative ones in the United States from an
50  R. T. CONN

Enlightenment perspective, see Ronald Briggs, Tropes of Enlightenment in

the Age of Bolívar: Simón Rodríguez and the American Essay at Revolution
(Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2010).
30. Oscar Sambrano Urdaneta, “Rufino Blanco Fombona y su editorial
‘América,’” Accessed June 13, 2018: http://revistas.upel.edu.ve/index.
php/letras/article/viewFile/5997/3274, 90.
31. José Enrique Rodó, Cinco ensayos: Montalvo, Ariel, Bolívar, Rubén Darío,
Liberalismo y Jacobinismo (Madrid: Editorial-América, 1915).
32. Sabino, Pinilla, La creación de Bolivia, Prologue and Notes by Alcides
Arguedas (Madrid: Editorial-América, 1917).
33. Oscar Sambrano Urdaneta, 88.
34. Miguel de Unamundo, Ed., Simón Bolívar, libertador de la América del
Sur, por los más grandes escritores americanos: Montalvo, Martí, Rodó,
Blanco Fombona, García Calderón, Alberdi (Madrid: Renacimiento, 1914),
118–119. “Era que en los estratos hereditarios de su alma, otra concepción
del Estado y el gobierno, existía, también metafísica, y, como la de
Rousseau, absorbente y exclusiva, pronto a surgir en su tiempo; ya lo ver-
emos. El profundo Taine ha observado en Napoleón cómo por su atavismo
itálico surgió en él la teoría del Estado tal como se la entendía en el Viejo
imperio romano. … en una palabra, la dictadura suya, considerándose él
como llamado a misión providencial; en el fondo, la misma viejs concep-
ción de los monarcas españoles.” “In the hereditary strata of his soul,
another conception of the State and government existed, also metaphysi-
cal, and, like that of Rousseau, absorbing and exclusive, ready to shoot
forth in time; we will shortly see this. The profound Taine has observed in
Napoleon that owing to an Italic atavism in him a theory of the State shot
forth that was like that of the old Roman empire. … in a word, his dictator-
ship, considering himself called to a providential mission; in the end, the
same old conception of the Spanish monarchs.”
35. José María Salaverria, Bolívar el Libertador (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe,
S.A., 1930).
36. Hal Draper, “Karl Marx and Simón Bolívar: A Note on Authoritarian
Leadership in a National-Liberation Movement,” New Politics (1st series),
Vol. VII No. 1, Winter 1968: 64–67.
37. John Lynch, The Spanish American Revolutions, 1808–1826 (New York:
W.W. Norton and Co., 1986).
38. William Spence Robertson, Rise of the Spanish-American Republics as Told
in the Lives of Their Liberators (New York and London: D. Appleton and
Company, 1918).
39. See Rodríguez O. on the 1967 edition of Robertson’s 1918 history in his
review of Lynch’s book. Rodríguez O., The Spanish American Revolutions,
1808–1826 (The History Teacher 9, no. 2), 319–321.
 1  AN INTRODUCTION  51

40. John Lynch, 1986, The Spanish American Revolutions, 1808–1826, 216.
41. John Lynch, Simón Bolívar: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2006), 10–11.
42. John Lynch, The Spanish American Revolutions, 1808–1826 (New York:
W.W. Norton and Co., 1973), 226.
43. Aline Helg, Liberty and Equality in Caribbean Colombia, 1770–1835
(Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 165.
44. Lynch, 1986, The Spanish American Revolutions, 1808–1826, 226.
45. Ibid., 263–265.
46. Ibid., 283.
47. Ibid., 265–266.
48. Ibid., 227.
49. Ibid., 186.
50. John Lynch, 2006, Simón Bolívar: A Life, 291.
51. Ibid., 284–286.
52. Ibid., 283.
53. Ibid., 290.
54. Ibid., 291.
55. Ibid., 302.
56. Ibid., 256. See also 269.
57. Eduardo Galeano, Las venas abiertas de América Latina (Mexico: Siglo
Veintiuno Editores, 1971).
58. John Lynch, 2006, Simón Bolívar: A Life, 302.
59. Stanley J.  Stein and Barbara H.  Stein, The Colonial Heritage of Latin
America; essays on economic dependence in perspective (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1970).
60. David Bushnell, The Santander Regime in Gran Colombia (Newark:
University of Delaware Press, 1954).
61. Jamie E. Rodríguez O., The Independence of Spanish America (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998), 91.
62. Idem.
63. Ibid., 92.
64. Ibid., 174.
65. Idem.
66. Ibid., 196.
67. Ibid., 21–22.
68. Lynch, The Spanish American Revolutions, 1808–1826, 1–24.
69. Ibid., 210.
70. Ibid., 205.
71. Jeremy Adelman, Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 177.
72. Ibid., 147.
52  R. T. CONN

73. Ibid., 213.

74. Ibid., 185.
75. Lynch, Simón Bolívar: A Life, 63–64.
76. Ibid., 214. It is interesting to note that the source provided by Adelman
for this interpretation is from the important biography by Gerhard Masur,
who in fact holds Miranda responsible, siding with Bolívar. As we will see
in Chap. 10, Masur’s biography had its own context.
77. William Spence Robertson, Rise of the Spanish-American Republics as Told
in the Lives of Their Liberators (New York: D.  Appleton Century Co.,
1942), 223.
78. Jaime E. Rodríguez O., The Independence of Spanish America (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998), 118–119.
79. J. H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America,
1492–1830 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 379.
80. Ibid., 376.
81. Idem.
82. Ibid., 391–398.
83. José Martí, Nuestra América, Intro. Pedro Henríquez Ureña (Buenos
Aires: Editorial Losada, 2016), 92. (“La fiesta de Bolívar en la Sociedad
Literaria Hispanoamericana,” New York, October 1893.)
84. “The New President of Mexico, Pascual Ortiz Rubio,” The Pan American
Union Bulletin (Vol. LXIV, February, 1930, no. 2), 109–110.
85. Germán Arciniegas, Bolívar y la revolución (Bogotá, Colombia:
Planeta, 1984).
 CHAPTER 2

Toward a Usable Narrative

If Bolívar has been pulled in different directions, his figure each time par-
tially erased as his interpreters go though and around him to produce
their particular iteration, we need a usable narrative against which to
begin to make sense of how he has been deployed in critical discourse.
The choice of beginnings and endings for constructing such a narrative is
not an innocent one, but in the interest of providing an account of the
most important spaces to which his interpreters go, always elaborating
them anew, let us start with his family origins, racial descent, and early life,
not because that is where we ourselves are starting or others have always,
but rather because it is a space of representation just as all other elements
of his life are, his biography worked and reworked on the national and
hemispheric stages.
Bolívar came from a wealthy Caracas family with slaves and plantations.
He lost his parents when he was young. With regard to his racial back-
ground and physical appearance, he is commonly represented as white,
but there is also disagreement about his racial heritage. The Bolívar family,
which came from the Basque region in Spain, dates back generations in
the Americas and includes, some argue, a union between a male forbear
who was Basque-descended and a female slave of African-­descent. John
Lynch approaches the matter from different perspectives. Using the physi-
cal description of Simón Bolívar provided by his first biographer, his loyal
aide-de-camp Daniel Florencio O’Leary, who is silent on the matter of
race, Lynch writes in his 1973 work that Simón’s “ancestors had

© The Author(s) 2020 53

R. T. Conn, Bolívar’s Afterlife in the Americas,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26218-1_2
54  R. T. CONN

bequeathed to him a trace of Negro blood, seen perhaps in his dark com-
plexion and thick lips.”1
In his 2006 biography, however, Lynch comes to a different conclusion
on the matter of O’Leary’s description, attributing Bolívar’s dark com-
plexion so familiar in classic portraits to “fifteen years of travel and cam-
paigns”2 under the sun and leaving aside the matter of the appearance of
his lips, which he had racialized, to speak of Bolívar’s and his family’s heri-
tage through means other than Bolívar’s physical appearance.3 We see this
in the first pages of Lynch’s 2006 book, where he addresses Venezuela’s
racially-defined caste society of the colonial period. Locating the debate
there instead of in Bolívar’s body, Lynch speaks of the colonial records
documenting the lineage of the Bolívars, a crucial source of knowledge
production at a time when such knowledge defined the place of families
in society:

The family lineage had been scoured for signs of race mixture in a society of
whites, Indians, and blacks, where neighbors were sensitive to the slightest
variant. But in spite of dubious evidence dating from 1673, the Bolívars
were always white.4

With this, Lynch closes the question by displacing it from Bolívar him-
self to his family lineage, while allowing the reader to peer into a sordid
reality defined by the brutality of racism with upper-class families seeking
to maintain their credentials showing them to be white.
There are Bolívar’s two tutors, one Simón Rodríguez, the other Andrés
Bello, the first who would become famous through Bolívar, the latter who
achieved his place on the world stage independent of him. Also commonly
represented are the three trips Bolívar made to Europe during his youth.
The first was to Spain (1799–1803) where he met María Teresa del Toro
Alayza who would be his wife. The second came soon after. Bolívar had
returned to Venezuela with his bride only to see her die of malaria after a
year of marriage. In mourning, he went back to Europe, this time to
France (1804–1806). But in Paris, his life would take a new turn as he
entered into a much spoken-of affair with a married woman said to be a
distant cousin, Fanny du Villars.5 She would become just one of his many
dalliances and connections that began in Paris, including his important
relationship with Ecuadorian Manuela Sáenz from 1822 to 1830, all ref-
erenced in different ways by his interpreters according to the necessities of
their own renderings.
 2  TOWARD A USABLE NARRATIVE  55

Love was not all Bolívar found in Paris. It is said that when he was in
Paris he became intrigued by Napoleon who famously had himself crowned
emperor at Notre Dame in one of the great spectacles of modern propa-
ganda.6 He also met the famous German naturalist Alexander Humboldt
at the salon of Fanny du Villars.7 Humboldt had just returned from the
Americas where he had studied and recorded the biogeography, years of
work that he would write up in 21 volumes. During this time, Bolívar as
we said earlier, apparently stood on one of the Montes Sacros of Rome,
the Aventino Hill, and in the presence of his former teacher Simón
Rodríguez, made his oath to liberate the Americas. Rodríguez had gone
to Paris after being pursued by Spanish authorities for his political views in
Venezuela, and there, as the story goes, the two happen upon each other,
and journey by foot to Rome. A written document called “El Juramento
de Roma,” “The Oath of Rome” exists, but some say that document was
fabricated after Bolívar’s passing. In Arvelo’s 2013 film, Libertador,
Rodríguez is made to play the role of Bolívar’s moral conscience, remind-
ing him of his responsibilities to Venezuela and America both during the
1804–1806 period in Paris, then later in 1830, when he appears to tell
Bolívar after the Admirable Congress that he must reclaim the continent.
The third trip to Europe was to London. He led a delegation represent-
ing the 1810 Junta Suprema that had declared loyalty to Fernando VII.
The purpose of that delegation, which included Andrés Bello, was to seek
military assistance from the British who were at war with Napoleon, and
after the 1808 Napoleonic invasion, aligned with Spain whose storied
armada it had defeated at the Battle of Trafalgar, Spain having been a cli-
ent state of Bourbon and Napoleonic France. For Bolívar, it was particu-
larly important to bring back the famous Venezuelan military leader and
intellectual Francisco de Miranda, who for years had resided in London
with a pension from the British and who had previously sought to liberate
Venezuela.
Bolívar has been made to stand for 1810, but he was hardly the most
significant leader at that time. Nor was the date the revolutionary beginning
that it has been made to seem by some prominent interpreters. Venezuela
did not declare the Junta Suprema until July 5, 1811. The confederation
that was formed consisted of a triumvirate, but soon after, when Spanish
general Juan Domingo de Monteverde was assembling forces to take the city
back, Miranda was appointed supreme general and dictator as well as presi-
dent of the republic. Miranda was not successful, plagued by desertions. The
final blow to the confederation was Colonel Bolívar’s loss of the armory in
56  R. T. CONN

1812 at Puerto Cabello to royalists who, held there, had bribed one of the
soldiers under Bolívar’s command. Miranda negotiated surrender along
with an agreement for himself to return to London. Bolívar’s loss of the
strategic location is the reason many historians, including Lynch, give for
Miranda’s decision, but Rodríguez O. and Adelman both argue, though in
different ways, that that event should be seen in a larger context, the confed-
eration already coming apart on account of Miranda’s position on slavery.
Bolívar fled to Cartagena. As he resituated himself, popular resistance
was alive in Spain, as Rodríguez O. underlines, with assemblies and mili-
tary units established across the country, and the Cortes, in coordination
with the British, moved finally within the region of southwestern Spain,
where they had been called, to Cádiz. In New Granada (Colombia) seces-
sion from Spain occurred according to the model of the city-state as well
as that of the territory-defined republic. The city of Cartagena declared
independence on November 11, 1811, and Tunja declared itself a republic
with authority over the entirety of New Granada on November 27, 1811.
Cartagena was a crucial site for Bolívar, allowing him the possibility of
establishing both an intellectual and military course. In his Cartagena
Manifesto he looks backward to set a path for the future, identifying as the
reasons for the failure of the confederation not the position taken by it on
the question of slavery, but: its decision to locate executive authority in a
triumvirate rather than a single person—a flimsy basis for a republic; its
decision not to form a professional army—the idea of using citizens in a
country with a culture not characterized by discipline as foolhardy and the
model for that decision Rousseau’s citizen-soldier; and the decision of the
leaders of the republic to adopt the principles of a federalist government
with power located in regions—principles in accordance with the US
Constitution but entirely unsuitable for the Venezuelan reality.
From Cartagena, where he was now in the employ of the city-­state,
Bolívar launched his march across the Andes into Venezuela to retake
Caracas. In the process of doing so he disobeyed orders not to enter
Venezuelan territory. This was the Campaña Admirable that brought
him his fame as the Libertador and in which he declared his Guerra a
Muerte (War to the Death), seen by some, like Elliott, as justifiable, by
others as so much evidence of a violent Bolívar. Entering Caracas, he
founded the Second Republic, placing himself as military dictator. But
the Libertador, as he was officially named on October 14, 1813 by the
mayor of Caracas, was only able to hold the city from August 6, 1813 to
July 6, 1814 suffering major defeats at La Puerta on February 3, 1814 and
 2  TOWARD A USABLE NARRATIVE  57

June 15, 1814, at the hands of a royalist Spanish immigrant from Asturias
who was semi-independent, taking orders only when it suited him from
Captain General Juan Manuel Cajigal, who had replaced Juan Domingo
de Monteverde in 1814.
Tomás Boves was a former ship pilot who had served time in prison for
smuggling and who later became a livestock trader. Recruiting among the
rural population to which his new work had drawn him near, he was able
to offer those he rallied—the majority mix-raced or pardo and indigenous
peoples—the promise of revenge against the mantuanos, the white aristo-
cratic class of the cities and towns of Venezuela of which Bolívar formed
part. To slaves he could offer freedom. With forces numbering 20,000,
Boves struck fear into the mantuanos. Where the Guerra a Muerte began
and where it ended is not clear. In response to the February 3 loss at La
Puerta, Bolívar ordered the execution of 1200 Spanish prisoners in Caracas
on February 8, 1814, certain that he would not be able to hold them in
the face of the military assault he expected after Boves’s February 3 vic-
tory. Boves avenged this act months later, executing the elites in Valencia
upon taking the city and later doing the same in Caracas, though thou-
sands had fled by the time of his arrival. He died in battle in December of
that year.
Fernando VII returned to Madrid on February 2, 1814, several months
after the British and Spanish resistance pushed a France severely weakened
by defeats in Russia from the peninsula. Bolívar, having fled Caracas, was
by the end of 1814 already back in New Granada to liberate Bogotá from
the Spanish. He’d been appointed military leader by the aspiring country
that was the United Provinces of New Granada, 1811–1816. He took
Bogotá, then on instructions from the United Provinces laid siege to the
famous Fort at Cartagena from March to May, charged to tear it away
from the Cartagena independentists to obtain arms for the purpose of
going east to drive out the Spanish from Santa Marta, their last bastion on
the coast. Unable to remove the command from the fort and facing the
prospect of the arrival of Pablo Morillo and his forces sent by Fernando
VII as part of his reconquest campaign, Bolívar left for the West Indies,
going to Kingston, Jamaica, where he wrote his famous Jamaica Letter.
From Jamaica he went on to Port-au-Prince, where he would receive mili-
tary support from Alexandre Pétion, the first president of the Republic of
Haiti, support that permitted him to return to the mainland to reclaim his
leadership of the struggle in 1817.
58  R. T. CONN

For Rodríguez and Adelman, among others, Fernando VII’s acts, by

pushing loyalists to the cause of independence, permitted Bolívar to gain
authority anew in a more comprehensive manner. But he had to vie with
others for leadership of the independence process, particularly regional
leaders or caudillos who in the area of northeastern Venezuela had made
important advances resisting the counter-revolution, Santiago Mariño
and Manuel Píar. He eventually ordered the imprisonment of Mariño,
though this never came to pass as Mariño gave up his command. Bolívar
had promoted Píar to General en Jefe (General in Chief) in May for the
decisive role he was playing in the attempt at taking Angostura, an impor-
tant small town on the Orinoco River that would serve as the base of
operations for what we know as the decisive Third Republic. He had led
the Batalla de Angostura (Battle of Angostura) on January 18. But after
May of that year Píar, who was pardo, refused to obey orders from Bolívar,
seeking to reestablish an alliance with Mariño and recruiting soldiers.
Bolívar executed him on October 16, 1817, after a military tribunal sen-
tenced him.8
The execution occurred after Bolívar had secured Angostura, on July 18.
Two weeks after the execution, on October 30, he issued a decree to orga-
nize a Consejo de Estado (Council of State). It called for the Council to
be made up of three divisions: State and Treasury; Navy and Army; Interior
and Justice. There was a Superior War Council, a Government Council, a
Trade Council, and a High Court of Justice, in addition to an office for
land sequestration. The Correo del Orinoco (Orinoco Post) commenced on
June 27, 1818, to counter the monarchist Caracas Gazette.
There are many moments in Bolívar’s life and career that have acquired
particular symbolic importance, interpreters taking a position on their
meaning while at the same time using them for political advantage. The
War to the Death is one such moment. So is the execution of Píar, inter-
preted and used like the War to the Death in multiple ways over the
decades in the context of state formation, race, and community. Among its
most recent interpreters, Aline Helg, professor of History at University of
Geneva, describes the act as a clear indication of Bolívar’s years-long goal
of holding back the pardo community, as Manuel Píar was a leader who
had a vision for an independent pardo state.9
Rodríguez O. views the act differently, not as necessarily showing
Bolívar’s determination to prevent a competing Afro-descended polity
from emerging, but as having no more than the simple but brutal objective
 2  TOWARD A USABLE NARRATIVE  59

of sending a clear message to his rivals, contenders like Santiago Mariño,

an ally of Píar, precisely that he was the one in control.10
Finally, Adelman does not speak of the execution, thereby not casting
judgment on Bolívar, but he does elevate Píar to statesman, comparing
him to Frei Caneca in Brazil and José Artigas in the Banda Oriental—the
future Uruguay. For Adelman, Píar is the author of a vision of a federalist
republic that “did not map so coherently onto the centralized state-nations
championed by unitarians.”11
We need to take note of this use of the word federalist. In certain key
republics in Latin America in the nineteenth century, federalism became
identified with regional rights more so than with the idea of a centralized
government to which regions are subordinated. In these contexts, the
words “unitarianism” and “centralism” came to be used instead of federal-
ism to designate the idea of a state that is a single government with author-
ity over partially self-governing regions. Adelman is placing Píar against
unitarianism in the space of Latin America’s nineteenth-century tradition
of regionalist or federalist government.
Bolívar delivered his address to the Congress of Angostura (February
15–July 31, 1821) on its first day. Months later, in what is his most leg-
endary expedition, he crossed the Andes into New Granada together with
the leader who hailed from that region, Francisco de Paula Santander,
taking the Spanish by surprise at Boyacá on August 7. Control of New
Granada was quickly established. Not missing an opportunity to promote
the cause of independence, with New Granada now declared independent
before the world, the congress established the Gran Colombia on
December 17, 1819, rendering the Venezuelan Constitution it had had
written and approved in the summer void. Venezuela and Ecuador, then,
still remained in Spain’s hands, but the congress with this act was announc-
ing to the world that at the helm of the patriot cause was a rational, repub-
lican leadership that was confident in its ability to produce a state in the
process of liberating territory. Santander had remained in Bogotá to gov-
ern, and Bolívar had returned to Venezuela both to continue the war cam-
paign and to attend the congress, which elected Francisco Antonio
Zea—former president of the congressional body—vice president, and
him president.
As this was transpiring—the seizure of territory from royalist control,
the formation of the Gran Colombia, and the continuing military
struggle—the Liberal revolutions of 1820 were sweeping through
60  R. T. CONN

southern Europe, beginning in Spain. On January 1, 1820, Major Rafael

de Riego proclaimed the 1812 constitution in Seville, refusing to take his
troops assembled in Cádiz to Buenos Aires. Riego, who had returned to
Spain in 1814 after six years of captivity in Napoleonic France, was going
against the orders of Fernando VII, who wanted to attack an independent
but defenseless Argentina, its troops in Peru, to reverse the momentum of
independence throughout South America. His revolt triggered other mili-
tary revolts in Spain, resulting in the king restoring the constitution on
March 10. Spain’s military revolts by Liberal leaders were not new, having
occurred in almost every year subsequent to Wellington’s decision to
restore Fernando VII. Now, successful, they sparked insurrections against
absolute rule in Portugal and Naples. In Naples, King Ferdinand I was
forced to accept a constitution modeled on Spain’s.
The Cortes lasted for three years, 1820–1823, though Liberals lost
their initial unity, divided between those who were loyal to the 1812
constitution and those who wanted to establish a new, more progressive
one. Not surprisingly, among the changes they instituted were protocols
on how to prosecute the war. Riego, in his declaration, had denounced
the living conditions his troops had been forced to tolerate, speaking of
how a whole year had gone by and conditions had become dire. But he
also criticized the war more broadly, stating that it had impoverished
Spaniards.12
Acting upon these concerns and seeking to resume the project cut short
by Fernando VII, the new Spain of the Cortes declared the 1812 constitu-
tion in the Venezuelan territory it still controlled and sued for peace with
Bolívar. Bolívar and the Spanish general Pablo Morillo met, but the armi-
stice did not last long. The fighting resumed. Bolívar and José Antonio
Páez, who in 1818 had joined forces in what was the most significant alli-
ance in the war efforts, defeated the Spanish leader Miguel de la Torre on
June 24, 1821 at the Battle of Carabobo. This was an enormous blow to
the Spanish. For with the defeat at Carabobo, Spain had now lost not only
New Granada, but also much of Venezuela.
Spanish Liberals now turned to the diplomatic front, seeking to con-
vince the United States—with which Fernando VII had in 1819 negoti-
ated the sale of Florida—not to recognize the independence of the
colonies, insisting that the United States was in its debt and should act
accordingly.13
The United States was not persuaded. In 1822 President James Monroe
recognized the Gran Colombia, La Plata, Chile, Peru, and Mexico, a move
 2  TOWARD A USABLE NARRATIVE  61

that forced Spain to turn its attention to another diplomatic front. This
was the Concert of Powers or the Quintuple Alliance—Russia, Austria,
Prussia, France, and the United Kingdom. Hoping to dissuade the Concert
of Powers from following the example of Monroe, Spain, as US historian
William Spence Robertson brilliantly explains, proffered a number of
arguments, all based on the idea of states working in unison under the
umbrella of the 1815 Treaty of Vienna. One argument had its basis in the
logic of cause and effect as applied to the law.
If what had produced the conditions for the independence movement,
the Napoleonic occupation of the Iberian Peninsula, could be described as
an act of illegality, then it followed that anything resulting from that act
was ill-gotten and had to be recovered. But which power would restore
the world to its legal order? Spain insisted she would, poised as it purport-
edly was, to regain control of the colonies. A second argument was that,
ideologically, it was not in the interest of the European monarchies to
allow revolution across the oceans, disorder abroad certain to have effects
on them. A third was directly about the ethic of neutrality, which was
respected in the old world, but not in the new. Playing on the new world/
old world dichotomy, and determined to achieve moral authority, Spain
submitted that the United Kingdom had followed that ethic, remaining
neutral during the long years of Spain’s colonial crises, the fact that it
allowed 7000 of its citizens to travel to Angostura, Venezuela to serve
under Bolívar overlooked. In contrast, an upstart United States had not.
After finally getting what it wanted—Florida—it ignored the lesson of the
mother country, thereby deviating from how a civilized state should act.
And a fourth argument had to do with the world economy. The Cortes
warned that the United States, as seen in the plan already proposed by US
Senator Henry Clay, was seeking to establish a hemispheric economic sys-
tem that would exclude all of Europe from the advantages of commerce,
a system that the American states, furthermore, would prefer to the
European, the US government being more like theirs.14 Some of these
arguments would have appealed to the Concert of Powers, but the Cortes
was in for a surprise from Restoration Europe.
On April 7, 1823, France sent 60,000 troops into Spain, freeing
Fernando VII from what had been a virtual house arrest and occupying
the country until 1828. Earlier, at the Congress of Verona, the last meet-
ing of the Quintuple Alliance, the states of the Holy Alliance had con-
cluded that the so-called revolution in Spain had gone on for long
enough, authorizing France to invade. The Holy Alliance had been
62  R. T. CONN

formed in 1815 at the urging of Russia to defend absolute monarchy.

With the exception of the United Kingdom, its members were the same
as those of the Quadruple Alliance, the formal military pact established in
1815 at the Treaty of Vienna whose purpose was to contain France. In
1818 Bourbon France joined both alliances. Wellington, who was the
British representative at the Congress of Verona, abstained from taking
part in the discussion. The United Kingdom, though, did respond to the
decision. George Canning, the foreign secretary, communicated to the
French Ambassador to the United Kingdom, Jules de Polignac, that the
United Kingdom would attack France’s naval vessels if they were sent to
the Americas.15 Canning was acting on concern already expressed by the
British about the overarching ideological purview of the Holy Alliance.
But he was also giving a diplomatic form to Britain’s decades-old practice
of trading with colonial merchants outside the boundaries of Spain’s
state-­controlled market, which practice is a major part of the context for
the story told by Adelman.
Britain was now going its own way, though the reactionary terms of the
peace established after the defeat of Napoleon would hold in Europe until
1830. Finally, James Monroe, whose recognition of the independence of
the five republics in 1822 had sent the Spanish Cortes into action in Europe
and who now had before him the example of a European Alliance that was
occupying Spain in the name of absolute monarchy and European preroga-
tive, delivered what would become known as the Monroe Doctrine in a
speech before the congress on December 2, 1823, proclaiming that the
United States would not allow any territory in the Americas to be taken by
a European power. The battle lines over commerce, territorial jurisdiction,
and empire had been drawn. Canning would take credit for Latin American
independence when it came at the end of 1824 and the beginning of 1825,
claiming to have created a barrier between the European Restoration and
the colonies. The United States would also seek to take credit by making a
show of having stood up to the Holy Alliance.
Elected head of state a second time under the US-inspired constitution
produced for the Gran Colombia at the Congress of Cúcuta in 1821, Bolívar
held that position from 1821 to 1830. In the early years of the Gran
Colombia there were several vice presidents who, except for Venezuelan
Juan Germán Roscío, hailed from New Granada where they had been leaders
of the United Provinces of New Granada. They were Francisco Antonio Zea,
Antonio Nariño y Alvarez, and José María del Castillo, each holding the
position briefly between 1819 and 1821. New Granadan Francisco de Paula
 2  TOWARD A USABLE NARRATIVE  63

Santander, the military leader who joined forces with Bolívar in 1818, the
same year José Antonio Páez also joined, was vice president from 1821 to
1827. The state included not only Venezuela, New Granada (now Colombia),
and the District of the South or of Quito (now Ecuador), but also northern
Peru, Guyana, and part of northwestern Brazil and was recognized by the
United Kingdom and the United States. Its capital was the mostly white
Bogotá, chosen for this reason, according to John Lynch, by a race-con-
scious Bolívar who preferred it to Caracas, which was predominantly black
and pardo.16 Others say the decision was made at the 1821 Cúcuta Congress.
The Gran Colombia, though, was not identified with Bolívar alone, but also
with Santander who led it as acting president during the years Bolívar went
with his troops to the south to liberate Quito, Guayaquil, Peru, and Alto
Peru, 1822–1826.
The southern expedition represented a new endeavor with different
actors, Páez remaining in Venezuela and Santander in New Granada. His
new lieutenant was Antonio José de Sucre, who led his forces to Guayaquil
and then to Quito, while Bolívar directed his through the south, winning
difficult battles at Bomboná (April 7, 1822) and at Riobamba (April 21,
1822). In Quito the two won a major battle in the foothills of the Pichincha
Volcano (May 24, 1822). Two months later, in Guayaquil, Bolívar met
with San Martín, who had traveled from Peru and who after their famous
conversation of which there is no clear, non-contested textual documenta-
tion mysteriously resigned his position as protector of Peru, eventually
leaving South America and retiring to France.
Much ink, particularly in Argentina, as we shall see in the course of
this book, has been spilled over what exactly was said at the July 26–27
meeting. But subsequent to San Martín’s resignation, Bolívar was invited
by Peru to bring his troops into the country, with the newly established
legislature twice appointing him dictator, once before he brought to
completion the liberation of the colony, for centuries the center of
Spanish power, and a second time subsequent to his having done so,
after the December 9, 1824, Battle of Ayacucho, led by Sucre, marked
the moment of definitive victory. As for Upper Peru, following Ayacucho,
Sucre, at the request of the region’s creole elites, led his Colombian
forces there to liberate it from royalist holdouts. Bolívar would not arrive
from his headquarters in Lima until August 12, 1825, but the Deliberative
Assembly that Sucre helped establish in February of 1825 named
the new country after him (August 6, 1825, as República de Bolívar,
two months later as Bolivia), with the city of Chuquisaca (formerly
64  R. T. CONN

La Plata from 1559 to 1809) designated the capital and renamed Sucre
in 1839, and also appointed Bolívar president. By these measures cele-
brating Bolívar, the Deliberative Assembly, arguably, hoped to obtain
and ensure its sovereignty in the face of the new republics of Peru and
the United Provinces of Río de la Plata, the successor states of the vice-
royalties to which the region belonged at different times under colonial
rule (Peru, 1542–1776; Río de la Plata, 1776–1810).
With the achievement of liberation, Bolívar gave free rein to his suprare-
gional, centralist dreams. He conceived of the Federation of the Andes,
which he explains in a letter dated May 12, 1826, to Sucre. This was to be
a massive state incorporating Peru, of which he was dictator; Bolivia; as well
as the territories of the Gran Colombia, of which he was president in absen-
tia. When he wrote to Sucre, he had just completed the Bolivian
Constitution, which the Bolivian legislature had asked him to produce.
Bolívar was not shy about communicating how pleased he was with his own
work, citing the effusive praise for it that had been expressed by José María
Pando, a Spanish-Peruvian who had served as secretary of state of Spain
during its constitutional monarchy of 1820–1823 and who after the French
invasion had returned to Peru to serve under Bolívar. Joyous about his
achievement, Bolívar spoke of how he had reconciled opposites by merging
into one political system the competing political models of the moment:

All will receive this constitution like the arc of an alliance and like the recon-
ciliation of Europe and America, of the army and the people, of democracy
and aristocracy, and of empire and the republic. Everyone tells me that my
constitution will be the great inducement for our social reform.17

The idea was for the constitution to be adopted first by Bolivia and
Peru, which both shortly did, and for the two republics to merge into a
federation, thereby establishing a model for the regions of the Gran
Colombia, which would also adopt the constitution. The constitution
called for a president for life in the executive branch with the vice presi-
dent appointed by the president and then succeeding him, a legislature
with a chamber of censors, a judiciary, an electoral college to take the place
of a direct vote, and the abolition of slavery.
Once the distinct regions of the Gran Colombia adopted the constitu-
tion, a structure would be put in place to unify them, with the office of the
president for life transferring to the larger multiregional state and with the
Liberator, who would be the first head of state, traveling from region to
region to ensure legal coherence and stability. For the constitution and for
 2  TOWARD A USABLE NARRATIVE  65

the large state, he provided several justifications. One was the threat of the
Holy Alliance with its goal of keeping monarchies in place. Not only had
Spain been returned to an absolute monarchy, with a continuing French
occupation force of 40,000, but also Fernando VII had taken revenge on
Liberals, executing over 20,000, including Riego, who was hanged in
Madrid. Other reasons were disorder, instability, and dissension in the
regions of the Gran Colombia, including in Quito. As for the idea of a presi-
dent for life, Bolívar in his May 25, 1826 address to the Peruvian Congress
used the example of state formation in Haiti to present the concept as the
New World democratic model. Power was successfully transferred from one
president for life to another, from Pétion to Jeanne-Pierre Boyer.
But the idea of a federation met with opposition, causing a rift between
Bolívar and Francisco de Paula Santander, though the new model was of
interest to Páez and Venezuelan elites, who provided one of the main
motivations to Bolívar for conceiving of the constitution and the federa-
tion in the first place. They had asked him to consider transforming the
Gran Colombia into a monarchy, which would preserve their autonomy
from the Republic’s capital in Bogotá. Venezuela’s independence move-
ment from the Gran Colombia, led by Páez, erupted in Valencia on April
30, 1826, and is known as La Cosiata (That Strange Thing) or la
Revolución de los Morrocoyes (the Turtle Revolution).18
As for Santander, he opposed the federation all the more vehemently
after he learned that Bolívar had in effect already set Venezuelan autonomy
in motion by not backing the order given by him and the congress of the
Gran Colombia for Páez to stand trial for refusing to send Venezuelan men
to Bogotá for service in the military. Add to this that Bolívar then named
Páez supreme civil and military commander of Venezuela on January 1,
1827, doing this to keep his state from disintegrating. In a situation in
which Bolívar was undermining Santander’s authority while creating new
fissures in the idea of a centralized Gran Colombia, Santander stood his
ground, opposing Bolívar’s call for a constitutional convention and argu-
ing that, legally, such a meeting could not take place until 1831, ten years
from the date of the Cúcuta Constitution, as stipulated by its writers.
Bolívar’s plan for a new state that would be a federation faced significant
obstacles within the political minefield of the Gran Colombia. But what
sealed its fate were events on the ground in the new regions liberated. Sucre,
president of Bolivia, having been appointed to that role by Bolívar, then
reappointed as such by the Deliberative Assembly under the constitution
Bolívar wrote for it, was pushed out of the country by a ­military uprising in
66  R. T. CONN

April 1828. Peru and the Gran Colombia, the former no longer adminis-
tered by Bolívar who had resigned from his appointment as dictator and
returned to the north, fell into a border war on June 3, 1828, a war that
continued until February 28, 1829.
Bolívar, during these years, also conceived of the Congreso de Panamá,
a diplomatic organization he charged with representing all the new
nations, except for Haiti, in their dealings with extra-hemispheric powers.
They met only once in Panama City in 1826, with a few states sending
delegates. The location made sense as Panama belonged to the Gran
Colombia, having joined the union in 1821 when it declared indepen-
dence from Spain, a relationship that would not change until 1903 when
in the context of the US canal project the province seceded to become an
independent nation.
But the crucial moment with regard to his final years came on August
27, 1828, when, months after his delegates and those of Santander failed
to come to an agreement on a new constitution at the Ocaña Constitutional
Congress of April 9–June 10, in which Santander in the end agreed to
participate, but to which he was able to send more delegates than Bolívar,
causing those of the latter to leave so that there would not be a quorum,
Bolívar declared a provisional dictatorship in the Gran Colombia. In the
weeks ahead with military power clearly serving as the basis of his author-
ity, New Granadan liberals—who opposed the dictatorship and were said
to have been inspired by Santander—attempted an assassination of him.
Bolívar had many of his would-be assassins executed, but he exiled
Santander after commuting the death sentence handed down by a military
tribunal. Challenging his state were other forces as well, as by this time not
only was Venezuela engaged in discussions on secession, but so was
Ecuador. In response to all this, as David Bushnell explains, Bolívar con-
templated a number of authoritarian possibilities to hold the Gran
Colombia together, though in the end he rejected all of them, leaving
some of his pro-­monarchy ministers frustrated. They included securing
the United Kingdom as the protector of the Gran Colombia. Bolívar knew
that the only way he could count on British support would be by achieving
for the region the status of a protectorate. They also included, in what
would have been an absolute sea change with regard to his view of
European powers other than the United Kingdom, securing a prince from
one of the monarchies of the Holy Alliance. Indeed, this was a different
Bolívar, who having narrowly escaped assassination had reversed himself
with regard to the politics he had pursued during his long military career.
 2  TOWARD A USABLE NARRATIVE  67

Now, he c­ ultivated the Catholic Church and the landowning elite while
banning from the universities in Bogotá the writings of the British secular
moralist Jeremy Bentham.
He had met Bentham in London in 1810 and had received letters from
him in 1822 and one in 1825 telling him he had sent several books of his
to him, including Constitutional Code and Codification Proposal, books,
though, that never arrived.19 The thought of a prince from France, Prussia,
Russia, and Austria—monarchies that he had despised for holding the
position they did—was conceivable at this moment when he sought an
alliance with the Brazilian monarchy.20
During this time, the assassination attempt on his life weighing on him
and political disorder in other regions of the Americas apparent—in
Mexico, Central America, and Argentina—he wrote sometime in the
spring of 1829 a report that was intended for publication in a newspaper,
“Una mirada sobre la América española” (“A Look at Spanish America”).21
Just as he had in the Jamaica Letter, he cast a wide net, speaking of many
of the postindependence republics and the instability and violence that
characterized them. He wondered as he had in his 1828 letter to Páez
whether liberation had been worthwhile. He critiqued the military and
political leader Vicente Guerrero in Mexico for overthrowing the govern-
ment on April 1, 1829. He described the insurgent war hero and politician
as barbaric and violent, using racist terminology to refer to him as African
and Indian descended. Bolívar disapproved of the decision in which
Guerrero had participated to execute the former leader Agustín de
Iturbide, whose son was part of Bolívar’s staff.
Ultimately, though, Bolívar convened the constituent congress at the
beginning of 1830—the Congreso Admirable or the Bogotá Congress—
as he promised he would, tasking it with writing a new constitution and
electing a president. As Bushnell also tells us, Bolívar saw to it that as many
pro-Bolívar delegates as possible were voted to attend it, engineering del-
egates in the way he believed Santander did for the 1828 constitutional
congress of Ocaña.22 These were the final moments in the life of the Gran
Colombia, reduced, as indicated in Chap. 1, to an apparatus governing no
more than the territorial limits of present-day Colombia in addition to
Panama. The Admirable Congress appointed Joaquín Mosquera presi-
dent, and ordered that Bolívar leave the country, this being the condition
set by Venezuela. Bolívar’s army disbanded, having not been paid for some
time, returning to Venezuela. Bolívar left for the coast.
68  R. T. CONN

In our discussion of how Bolívar’s interpreters have positioned him

over time, and have drawn different conclusions about the merits and
meanings of his intellectual figure the following becomes clear: Bolívar
was a prolific writer and serious political thinker, inspired by the French
Enlightenment and the Greco-Roman tradition as well as by British
constitutionalism. He used his literary and intellectual talent to frame
the cause of liberation as a colonial struggle; to offer visions of a new
American identity; to advocate for the abolition of slavery; to contrib-
ute to the making of one constitution; and to conceive a constitution
that was entirely his own. We have already spoken of the 1812
Cartagena Manifesto in connection to Ángel Rama and Augusto
Mijares, the one adopting Bolívar’s reading of the 1811 constitution
presented therein, the latter slyly refuting that reading; and the 1826
Bolivian Constitution, briefly adopted by Peru and Bolivia. But let us
consider, before we go on, two other major texts of Bolívar’s that have
already been mentioned, the Jamaica Letter (1815) and the Angostura
Address (1819).
The first, now one of the most recognizable works in the Latin American
canon, was produced in a moment of crisis to promote the independence
movement. Interestingly, it did not find its way into print in Spanish until
1833, with its influence during Bolívar’s lifetime limited to references
made to it by Bolívar in published writings, and through an English trans-
lation of 1818.23 The second, the Angostura Address, was formulated in a
moment of triumph and political consolidation of the patriot forces in
southeastern Venezuela. The four documents have appeared in multiple
ways, whether together or separately, and/or are framed by other docu-
ments authored by Bolívar. Those other documents include a letter of
1816 in which he speaks on race relations, civil war, and Haiti, documents
of importance, as we have said, for the work of Aline Helg who also stud-
ies the racial hierarchy that comes into being in northern new Granada in
the 1820s with Venezuelan white generals like Carlos Soublette being
given important posts. Others are from the 1820s. Serving in many cases
the purpose of defining his so-called last chapter, they range from his 1822
poem, “My Delirium atop the Chimborazo,” said by some to be fabri-
cated;24 to his words in a letter to Juan José Flores just a month before his
death that speak of a future of little tyrants of all colors and races, of an
America that is ungovernable, and of those who have served the revolu-
tion having plowed the sea. With regard to his words about plowing the
 2  TOWARD A USABLE NARRATIVE  69

sea, they are often cited. The exact ones written by Bolívar and that he
purportedly repeated on his deathbed are “El que sirve la revolución ara en
el mar” (“He who serves a revolution ploughs the sea”).25 In addition,
there are purported words of his cited in a newspaper article from 1850
alleged to have been found in the Venezuelan archive by German-born
historian Gerhard Masur. Bolívar says that he dreams of creating a large
American state, uniting north and south. The text is perhaps of dubious
origin, but it rises to the level of an invaluable archival discovery for Masur.
To be sure, Bolívar’s statements on social order, anarchy, and race cut
both ways. They have been cited by those who wish to disqualify him as a
state leader and those who, desiring to do just the opposite, use his figure
to justify their authoritarian top-down visions.
The September 6, 1815 Jamaica Letter was a response to a letter writ-
ten to Bolívar by a British resident of Jamaica, Henry Cullen. Bolívar
penned it at the lowest moment of the struggle for independence, when
he found himself on the British-controlled Island, having fled the main-
land in the face of the overwhelming forces of the Spanish under the com-
mand of Pablo Morillo. In the letter he appeals to the British, which
together with Russia, Austria, and Prussia had just defeated Napoleon.
He asks for military assistance against the Spanish, using a slew of ele-
ments from the arsenal of French Enlightenment rhetoric and discourse
to argue that Latin American independence is deserving of being sup-
ported. The elements from that arsenal that he weaves into the letter
include the emblem of light and darkness, the binary of civilization and
barbarism, the idea of a single humanity (though for Bolívar humanity in
Latin America has its own historical reality, being in its infancy), the criti-
cal category of universal reason, the project of education, the concept of
free international commerce, contract and political theory, and names of
the thinkers who created these new categories and lines of inquiry, includ-
ing Montesquieu and Rousseau, the former whose Spirit of Laws, the
premier text of the new political theory of the age, he draws upon to offer
a reflection on the political forms that the liberated regions of Latin
America will take.
Deploying these elements, he puts on quite a performance. For starters,
he asserts that the independence movement is still alive and that victory is
inevitable, destined to be achieved either by his generation or by a subse-
quent one, the consciousness awakened in him and others certain to take
70  R. T. CONN

hold again should there be failure. He also submits that creoles leading the
independence movement are a social class with legitimate claims to power
going back to what he states, using Spanish political contract theory of the
1500s, that of Bartolomé de Las Casas as well as of Guerra, was a contract
established between emperor Charles V (Carlos I of Spain) and the con-
querors and first colonizers; that Spain is a barbaric empire that has pre-
vented its colonies from developing, with the colonies, therefore, needing
assistance to gain the footing denied them by centuries of neglect; that
independentists will prevail over royalists despite the fact that they have
just been defeated; that independence offers to the world the possibility of
new markets consisting of rich Latin American primary resources, markets
that will occupy an important place in enlightened commerce, with Latin
America serving both as a complement to Europe and as a center of com-
merce between east and west; and, to give a last example appearing early
in the letter, that just as happened in Europe where nations came into
being after the break-­up of the Roman Empire, nations would emerge
from the collapse of Spain. In the parallel he draws, Spain is like the Roman
Empire in decline, but the resemblance stops there: it is not the indige-
nous communities of Latin America—the structural equivalent of the
tribes of Europe conquered by the Romans, the Gauls, or the Visigoths,
for instance—who will be the new subjects of history. Rather, in a formu-
lation that will be fraught, it is individuals of Spanish descent born in the
Americas, creoles, who will occupy that position, wedged between the
Spanish conquerors and the indigenous, the latter long ago dispossessed
of their lands, rightful owners though the indigenous are, as he famously
states, underlining with this the historical violence that has led to creole
subjectivity. What is Bolívar up to? He is explaining to Europeans what the
creole class is, a class distinct from the Spanish and the indigenous, and he
is also explaining, in a situation in which divisions among creoles have
been much reported, that independentist creoles, a minority compared to
royalist, will prevail.
A little less than four years elapsed between the Jamaica Letter and the
Angostura Address. The beginning of that period saw Bolívar in December
of 1815 leave Jamaica for Haiti in search of support from the country’s
president Alexandre Pétion, and to join other Venezuelan exiles in Les
Cayes. Before leaving, however, he penned another letter to a different
British correspondent—the letter of which we spoke above in connection
to Aline Helg—making the same plea for British assistance only now with
the explicit goal of demonstrating to the British that racial discord was not
 2  TOWARD A USABLE NARRATIVE  71

the issue in the way it had been in pre-revolutionary Haiti. He explains

that the numerically small creole class was especially qualified for its leader-
ship role, that the racial violence that had occurred was contingent, the
result of the Spanish promising African slaves the property of their creole
masters in the case they leave them to join their military ranks, that the
relationship between creole masters and slaves is a harmonious one, and
that the indigenous represent a stabilizing force, desiring only to remain
in their communities. With his arrival in Haiti and his meeting with Pétion
on January 2, 1816, Bolívar’s position on slavery in relationship to white
hegemony was about to change. Pétion offered to provide ships and pro-
visions to Bolívar provided he vow to abolish the institution once indepen-
dence was achieved. Bolívar accepted the condition, with Pétion supporting
a first voyage that failed, then a second that was successful.
Without Pétion, it is not clear how Latin American independence would
have come about, nor when, if ever, Bolívar would have changed his views
to favor abolition, though other leaders could have emerged at this time in
response to the polarization created by Fernando VII. Interestingly, as we
have said, historian Jeremy Adelman does not speak of Bolívar’s exile, con-
cerned as he is with understanding the process of the military struggle as
the result of complex forces including Fernando VII’s counter-­revolution,
which, he underlines, is what permitted Bolívar to gain authority, and with
seeing the initiative to end slavery as the result of the racial politics of the
war struggle, not of Bolívar’s relationship with Pétion.26
But if Haiti played a crucial role in allowing Bolívar another day to lead,
with Bolívar moving to assume the position of abolitionist as he promised
he would to Pétion, so would Britain, though not as called for by Bolívar
in his missives. Instead of the British fleet, assistance came in the form of
non-state actors. As Bolívar returned to the mainland in 1816, established
his authority as leader of the independence movement, and founded the
Third Republic in Angostura on the Orinoco River in 1817, soldiers and
officials recruited by an agent of Bolívar in London, where Bolívar also
had a representative of the independence movement in the highly regarded
intellectual Andrés Bello, began to stream into the region to serve under
his command. Many were from Britain’s unemployed Napoleonic armies,
with some who had never seen military service, but as Matthew Brown
explains in his 2006 Adventuring Through Spanish Colonies, the seven
thousand who traveled across the Atlantic between 1816 and 1825 were a
mix of mercenaries, idealists, and adventurers. Some, then, were inspired
by the promise of payment for duties rendered, others by the opportunity
72  R. T. CONN

to defend the concepts of liberty and freedom, having just successfully

done so in Spain against Napoleon. Others were interested in settling ter-
ritories that promised to be new republics, new utopias to contribute to.27
Bolívar delivered the Angostura Address on February 15, 1819, bol-
stered by his army with which he would cross the Andes into New Granada,
an army incorporating thousands of plainsmen of different races, former
black slaves who had gained their liberty by joining the military fighting in
years past, and European soldiers. Everything had changed. In contrast to
the Jamaica Letter where a defeated Bolívar speaks in the name of an elite
economic class and of a Latin America ready to be incorporated into the
British world system, in the Angostura Address he presents himself as the
citizen/leader of a new state: the Gran Colombia with the territorial limits
we already know. He and his army were poised to bring into existence,
through military action, a state in which, true to his pledge to Pétion,
slavery would be abolished. Former slaves were now to be citizens, and his
soldiers would be rewarded with lands and celebrated as fathers of the
republic in the Order of the Liberators, the highest distinction for service
to the country that was created by Bolívar in 1813. In the body of the
address, previous to these statements, which come as a list at the end, he
outlines for the assembled leaders from the Venezuelan economic and
military elites the British-inspired political system he conceives of, one
with a president rather than a king and with stress on the division of pow-
ers. He offers that system as a blueprint for the constitution to be drawn
up for the Gran Colombia, one in which through Rousseau, as Lynch tells
us, Bolívar defends the principle of equality, arguing that the state has the
responsibility to correct the inequalities that define human beings in their
natural state—individuals all having different talents and aptitudes—and
to give expression to peoples who are racially diverse. Europeans had
mixed with the indigenous and Africans, and Africans with the indigenous
and Europeans, all offspring of the same mother, as he puts it, but with
fathers of dissimilar origins and races, fathers who were foreigners with
different epidermises.28
Presenting his constitution as continuing and correcting that of 1811,
he develops a hermeneutic based on what Montesquieu, inspired by Plato,
presents as the twin dangers of direct democracy and tyranny, the former
leading to the latter. His government will not fall into this pattern, pro-
moting as it will education and strong government privileging executive
authority and calling for a hereditary senate to be made up of experts in
the law and who will see the republic through difficult times.
 2  TOWARD A USABLE NARRATIVE  73

Bolívar was threading a needle, making the 1811 constitution stand for
Montesquieu’s absolute democracy and arguing for the need to bring to
that constitution protections and limitations that elevated the principle of
moral and responsible leadership above governmental system itself. He
also conceived of a fourth branch of government, the Moral Branch, of
which we have spoken and that he modeled on the Athenian Areopagus
and Roman censors, also derived from the writings of Montesquieu. This
body would oversee not only education, but also the behavior of citizens
and public officials, authorized to censure or remove the latter for viola-
tions and to reprimand those among the former who were not sufficiently
active. Indeed, moral behavior had become all-important for Bolívar, with
a Rome different from that of the Jamaica Letter taking center stage.
He now describes the colonial legacy of which he speaks in the Jamaica
Letter not only in relationship to the exclusion of the creoles from the
administration of the colony, but also in connection to the idea of moral
perversion, a condition that had resulted from centuries of colonization
and that they needed to overcome. Rome would provide a model for the
institutionalization of virtue. At the same time, Bolívar advised that leg-
islators should look not only to France and England, but also to the
United States, though not to its federal system, which he stood against
throughout his career, a straw man of a kind for his top-down or aristo-
cratic republican vision of governance. Judging by what he proposes in
regard to the executive, he is referring to the concept of checks and bal-
ances, so important in the US Constitution, but which as we have said,
he would have gotten from Montesquieu and from the United Kingdom,
the latter serving as an inspiration to the French thinker. In justifying
increased authority for his single executive that would take the place of
the triumvirate of the 1811 constitution, he speaks of how the presi-
dent’s council was to act as a check on the president, its members desir-
ous of protecting the virtue of the office lest their own reputations be
besmirched.
How, in dialogue with one another, interpreters have constructed
Bolívar’s figure using the story of his personal, military, and political life—
including the texts he authored, the figures of whom he spoke and whom
he met (some perhaps only according to legend), the traditions in which he
worked: classicism, the French Enlightenment (Montesquieu and Rousseau),
British constitutionalism and others in which he has been placed—is the
central subject of this book. Bolívar, who comes to us always either paired
74  R. T. CONN

with another or placed in a larger group, has been made to stand as the
foundation for so many projects of a national and/or hemispheric stamp,
the way he is presented the key to unlocking struggles and debates across
the Americas.

Notes
1. John Lynch, The Spanish American Revolutions, 1808–1826 (N.Y.: W. W.
Norton and Co., 1973), 201.
2. Ibid., 22 and 231.
3. John Lynch, Simón Bolívar: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2006), 22.
4. Ibid., 2.
5. Ibid., 23.
6. Ibid., 24.
7. Ibid., 23.
8. Felipe Larrazábal, 1865, La vida y correspondencia general del libertador
Simón Boliva; enriquecida con la inserción de los manifiestos, mensages,
exposiciones, proclamas, &. &. (New York: E.O. Jenkins, 1865), 490.
9. Aline Helg, Liberty and Equality in Caribbean Colombia, 1770–1835
(Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 165–166.
10. Jaime E. Rodríguez O., The Independence of Spanish America (Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 188.
11. Jeremy Adelman, Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 396.
12. Ibid., 303–304.
13. William Spence Robertson, “The Recognition of the Hispanic American
Nations by the United States” (The Hispanic American Historical Review
1, no. 3, 1918): 239–269.
14. William Spence Robertson, “The United States and Spain in 1822” (The
American Historical Review 20, no. 4, 1915), 781–800.
15. H.  W. V. Temperley, “The Latin American Policy of George Canning”
(The American Historical Review, Vol. 11, No. 4, July 1906), 779.
Temperley writes: “Further, he rendered her [the United States] an essen-
tial service in forcing Polignac, by a threat of war on October 9, 1823, to
disclaim any idea of French aggression or influence to restore the revolted
colonies to Spain.”
16. John Lynch, The Spanish American Revolutions, 1808–1826, 254–255.
The historians Frank Safford and Marco Palacios (Colombia: Fragmented
Land, Divided Society [New York: Oxford University Press, 2002]), of
whom we shall speak in Chap. 12, indicate that the Congress of Cúcuta,
 2  TOWARD A USABLE NARRATIVE  75

which had a higher number of New Granadans than Venezuelans, actually

made the decision to locate the capital in Bogotá. The Cuban intellectual
José Marti, as we shall see in Chap. 4, shares that view.
17. Bolívar’s May 12, 1826, letter to Sucre in Gerald E. Fitzgerald, Ed., The
Political Thought of Bolívar: Selected Writings (The Hague, Netherlands:
Martinus Nijhoff, 1971). For the letter in Spanish, see … “Todos recibirán
esta constitución como el arca de la alianza y como la transacción de la
Europa con la América, del ejército con el pueblo, de la democracia con la
aristocracia y del imperio con la república. Todos me dicen que mi consti-
tución va a ser el gran móvil de nuestra reforma social.”
18. For more, see: https://www.lifeder.com/cosiata/.
19. John Lynch, Simón Bolívar: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2006), 245.
20. See David Bushnell, Ensayos de Historia Política de Colombia (Medellín:
La9. Carreta Editores E.U., 2006), 80–94.
21. “Una mirada sobre la América española,” April to June, 1829, in Simón
Bolívar: Doctrina del Libertador (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1994).
22. Ibid., 85–87.
23. John Lynch, 2006, Simón Bolívar: A Life (New Haven: Yale University
Press), 95.
24. José María, Rodríguez García, The City of Translation: Poetry and
Ideology in Nineteenth-Century Colombia (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2010).
25. Simón Bolívar, Letter to Juan José Flores on November 9, 1830, in Simón
Bolívar: Doctrina del Libertador (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1994),
272–275.
26. Adelman, Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic, 286.
27. Matthew Brown, Adventuring Through Spanish Colonies: Simón Bolívar,
Foreign Mercenaries and the Birth of New Nations (Liverpool: Liverpool
University Press, 2006).
28. Simón Bolívar, Discurso de Angostura, in Simón Bolívar: Doctrina del
Libertador (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1994), 93–94.
 CHAPTER 3

Bolívar in Nineteenth-Century Venezuela

In this and the following chapters, we focus on Venezuela’s Bolivarian

tradition, called by some a cult. Accounting for it is challenging. To start,
the story of Bolívar often reads as if it were coterminous with the
Venezuelan republic from its beginning in 1830 through the present.
Even the secession movement, led by Venezuelan elites and former
Bolivarian general and hero of independence, José Antonio Páez, against
Bolívar and his Gran Colombia (1819–1831) can be hard to make out,
remaining subordinated to larger narratives rooted in the figure of Bolívar
and the independence process. Who has constructed these narratives? The
nation’s diverse actors have. They have done so to have a platform for their
battles over the political identity of the country. Two dates are of particu-
lar importance with regard to those battles: April 19, 1810, when the
cabildo (town council) of Caracas declared loyalty to King Fernando VII,
sequestered in Bayonne, France, and July 5, 1811, when the Venezuelan
Congress proclaimed independence from Spain. As for Venezuela’s consti-
tutional tradition, instability has defined it, with new presidents or political
groups declaring constitutions to reflect the political and social order as
they conceive it, most recently as seen in the cases of the constitutions of
1961 and 1999. With all the changes, the 1811 constitution, the first
Venezuelan Constitution, has continued to be central at a symbolic level.
In his Angostura Address, Bolívar himself, who vehemently criticized that
constitution but who had before him many of the principal actors from the
oligarchy of the defeated First Republic, represented the 1811 c­ onstitution

© The Author(s) 2020 77

R. T. Conn, Bolívar’s Afterlife in the Americas,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26218-1_3
78  R. T. CONN

as having legal force; the new constitution to be drafted would replace it.
In 1830, the Venezuelan Congress represented itself as recuperating the
1811 constitution when it finally formally seceded from the Gran
Colombia. In the battles that Venezuelans have waged over their political
and social identity, the First Republic, its constitution, and the constitu-
tions that have followed have been at the center of discussion.
To recover these dates and places in their hermeneutical dimension, we
locate ourselves in the Venezuelan state founded in 1830, following the
actors who have reflected on Bolívar, the different knowledges they have
constructed through and around him—liberalism and classicism, positiv-
ism, critical humanism, and socialism, with Marxist thought an important
element of discourse and counter-discourse from the 1920s forward—and
the ways those knowledges are used to define the social and political order
in the context of civil war, military insurrection or the threat of it, and the
state. Exile in addition to prison and assassination have accompanied that
process, with speaking out providing the conditions for all three. Actors
either leave the country to find that they cannot return, depart and then
return, or exit definitively. Of course, many stay too, seeking to support
and build the institutions of Venezuelan society, understanding what it
takes to remain. Recently, the economy has become a new cause for exit,
with citizens, at large, departing for neighboring countries and for Europe
and the United States. Among Venezuela’s exiles, Bolívar heads the list,
his remains and figure repatriated; followed by Páez; writer Felipe
Larrazábal; banking magnate and caudillo Manuel Antonio Matos; presi-
dent of the republic and Matos’s nemesis, José Cipriano Castro; writer
Rufino Blanco Fombona; still another president of the republic, Rómulo
Betancourt; and writer Mariano Picón Salas. The list goes on and on,
including prominent communist leaders from the 1920s to the 1960s and
scores of individuals from the intelligentsia of these times as well as from
the military. To consider this reality, we also focus on what we will call the
written Bolívar, examining how actors have used the vast written record as
given through Bolívar’s voluminous writings, the edited collections that
mediate those writings, and previous interpreters of his figure to make
truth claims about who he was and what he stood for and to construct
their own intellectual practices. Venezuela’s Bolivarian tradition has a long
history, serving as the stage for the country’s struggle over liberalism and
authoritarianism, with repercussions throughout the Americas from the
nineteenth century through Hugo Chávez.
 3  BOLÍVAR IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY VENEZUELA  79

To begin our story, we need to work backward and forward from

Venezuela’s watershed moment in the nineteenth century, the devastating
civil war of 1859–1863 between the Conservative and Liberal Parties,
known as the Guerra Federal or the Guerra Larga (Federal or Long War),
and the key moment that Venezuelan actors look to as they narrate their
history. The war was won by Liberals with more than 100,000 dead,
bringing to an end what some came to call in hindsight, “Venezuela’s
Golden Era,” 1831–1858, a period of relative economic growth and polit-
ical stability with planters having access to credit in order to transform the
cacao estates of the late 1700s into coffee estates.1
Controlling the politics of that era were José Antonio Páez—who,
when not president himself (1830–1835 and 1839–1843), was king-
maker—and former Bolivarian general, José Tadeo Monagas. Monagas,
whom Páez entrusted to carry the mantle of the Conservative Party, hav-
ing counted on him previously to support his positions, took up the
Liberal Party cause soon after his election to president by the Conservative-­
dominated Congress in 1847. Together with his brother José Gregorio,
he held power from 1847 to 1858.
Bolívar was an integral symbolic presence in the period, a phenomenon
best explained by historian Carrera Damas in the book already spoken of,
his 1969 El culto a Bolívar (The Cult of Bolívar). Carrera Damas shows
that the same elite sector that under the leadership of Páez expelled Bolívar
quickly appropriated his figure from the Bolívar-admiring masses, precisely
to govern those masses. By doing so, they legitimized themselves before
one another with the result that Bolívar tropes became ubiquitous across
the political spectrum.2
Páez, himself, participated using Bolívar in the early 1830s to seek to
legitimize executive authority, and in his second term in office, by comply-
ing with Liberal demands to bring Bolívar’s remains back from Santa Marta,
New Granada (today Colombia). But Carrera Damas, with the new geneal-
ogy he proposes—one tracing Venezuela’s twentieth-century cultural and
political devotion to his figure back to the beginning of the republic—was
hardly the first to offer an interpretation of these important years that a few
decades prior to his writing, as we shall see in the next chapter, had been
the object of systematic periodization for the purpose of creating histories
for the state. In the 1950s, Venezuelan intellectual Mariano Picón Salas,
whom we shall address in Chap. 8, speaks positively. Critical of his own
decade, which saw the military leader Marcos Pérez Jiménez in power and
Pérez Jiménez’s civilian nemesis Rómulo Betancourt in exile, he celebrates
80  R. T. CONN

mid-nineteenth-century actors such as politician and minister Fermín Toro

and writer Juan Vicente González, figures who, true to their moral princi-
ples, faced down authoritarian power in ways that his generation had not
been able to do.3
To reinvigorate political action in the 1950s, Picón Salas could have
called upon many figures who exercised free speech at their own peril dur-
ing the period of 1831–1863 and beyond. One such figure is Antonio
Leocadio Guzmán, who founded the Liberal Party in 1840, famously
using the press to incite the provinces against the Conservative president
Carlos Soublette. Soublette imprisoned him in 1846 with the death pen-
alty imposed as punishment for his free-speech misdeeds but his life would
be spared a year later when fellow Liberal, José Tadeo Monagas, became
president. Another figure he could have called upon is Felipe Larrazábal,
a politician, lawyer, journalist, and composer. Larrazábal was part of
Venezuela’s Liberal machine, working to enact the legislative agenda of
the Monagas brothers.
The brothers, no less authoritarian than Conservative leaders Páez and
Soublette, managed power not only by alternating in the executive office,
but also by extending their nepotistic pact through the appointments they
made. One major political act they are remembered for is their attack on
the Congress in 1848, which came after José Tadeo was accused of misus-
ing public funds, operating the government outside of Caracas, and using
the armed forces without approval from the Government Council. With
three deputies killed, many Conservatives left, though Conservative sena-
tor, Fermín Toro refused to be intimidated. Páez rose up only to be
defeated twice and then sent into exile. During his second term, José
Tadeo Monagas established two new constitutions, one in 1857 and
another in 1858. With the second, he instituted universal suffrage, ended
the death penalty, abolished slavery, established freedom of the press, and
extended the term limit of the executive from four to six years. Conservatives
and others had had enough, unwilling to accept what in their view was a
personal family dynasty with a congress filled with Liberals that had voted
him president a second time despite there being a growing sense of eco-
nomic crisis. When one of his trusted generals, Julián Castro, rose up to
remove him from office in 1858, Monagas did not seek to hold on to
power, going into exile. The overthrow, which was the only successful one
up to that point and which was denounced by the United States, marked
the beginning of the civil war, setting in motion the response of new pro-
gressive Liberal leaders who sought to regain the presidency.
 3  BOLÍVAR IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY VENEZUELA  81

They were Ezequiel Zamora, killed in 1860, and Juan Crisóstomo

Falcón, the latter who would go on to be president in the war’s aftermath.
As historians have written, many were the factors that came together to cre-
ate the conditions for what became a bloodbath. Not only were there ven-
dettas to be paid among Conservatives and Liberals, economic depression
had left thousands without work, and former slaves, though free for decades,
were forced to return to the estates to which they had been yoked. In the
absence of the old social consensus, punctuated by military uprisings and
repressions, and built upon the hegemony of the oligarchy, the popular
classes were suddenly on the national stage, available to form part of the
small militias assembled by both Liberals and Conservatives, with criticism
of the country’s wealthy, the most prominent of these, independence gener-
als Páez and Soublette, providing the ideological grist for action and reaction.
We take up the story with Larrazábal, who provides a bridge between
the pre- and post-civil war and who established one of the foundations for
Venezuela’s Bolivarian tradition, the individual to whom future interpret-
ers responded, representing over time by virtue of the importance his text
acquired the beginning of a logic of cultural production. Larrazábal, with
the end of the Guerra Federal and the country’s coffee economy in shat-
ters, wasted no time, seeking to establish a new beginning for Venezuela
by bringing out in 1865 a work that he had begun to write in the 1850s
and through which he hoped to set a course for the future, one defined by
constitutionalism and classicism.4 This was La vida y correspondencia gen-
eral del libertador Simón Bolívar (The Life and General Correspondence of
the Liberator Simón Bolívar),5 published at the Eduardo O. Jenkins Press
in New  York City, a Spanish-language publishing house that had long
been putting into print the works of Latin American statesmen and
authors. In its two tomes, which would see multiple printings not only at
the Eduardo O.  Jenkins Press, but also at other New York City presses
starting as soon as 1866 and extending through the 1870s and 1880s with
an English language edition also in 1866 and a combined volume edition
in 1887 at D. Appleton y Compañia,6 Larrazábal defends and celebrates
Bolívar’s life in the impressive narrative he writes, incorporating for analy-
sis and documentary evidence several of his texts, both public and private,
and letters from other actors from the times. Larrazábal explains to readers
that Bolívar’s works represent a wonder that parallels archeological discov-
eries achieved by states in Europe in the nineteenth century, a past
unearthed, so to speak, symbolizing a distinguished legacy for both
Venezuela and Latin America, even a step forward for civilization.7
82  R. T. CONN

Through the volumes, Larrazábal sought to clean up the text produc-

tion about Bolívar from the times of independence through the present.
He responds to criticisms of Bolívar that circulated in the Americas, in
Europe, and in Spain, criticisms that include the Spanish essayist Joseph
Blanco White’s derogatory remarks about Bolívar’s parading of the urns
containing the remains of fallen soldiers and those spread by one of
Bolívar’s most inveterate enemies, the Venezuelan royalist, José Domingo
Díaz, who published Recuerdos sobre la rebelión de Caracas (Memories of
the Caracas Rebellion) in Madrid in 1829. Díaz describes Bolívar as vio-
lent,8 with Bolívar’s War to the Death proclamation in Trujillo, Venezuela
on June 15, 1813, and other acts serving as evidence for that characteriza-
tion. Indeed, if there was one element that Larrazábal was responding to,
it was precisely this, discourse having to do with Bolívar’s War to the
Death. On the subject of Bolívar’s execution of Manuel Píar on October
16, 1817, he both celebrates Píar as a great military hero and defends
Bolívar, telling of how he establishes immediately a “Republic … gov-
erned according to the foundations of modern politics, whose major prin-
ciples are the division and the equilibrium between the branches of
government.”9 Most importantly, Larrazábal constructs a narrative that
defends Venezuela’s war with the Spanish, telling of Spanish military lead-
ers in the Americas who did not dialogue with the First Republic and of a
foolish king who turned against constitutional monarchy. He also attacks
the Bourbons, speaking of the House of Austria, which demanded the
release of Fernando VII. Spain together with Napoleon is farcical.
Classicism appears on two levels. On the one hand, Larrazábal brings
Bolívar forth in relationship to the Hellenic and Roman world of knowl-
edge production that for centuries dominated academic and elite dis-
course in Europe and parts of the Spanish colonies and which Bolívar
came to master through his own readings. On the other hand, Larrazábal
uses classicism as a hermeneutic space in which to place Bolívar’s life and
career, including the Gran Colombia—which Bolívar conceived and over
which he presided between 1819 and 1830, though in absentia from
1822 to 1826. He is the civilizer who through his knowledge of the art
of persuasion and his command of the Greco-Roman tradition, both of
which are in ample evidence throughout his writings, brings order,
enlightenment, and peace to his worlds. In doing all this, Larrazábal
defends both Bolívar and his state, speculating that had Bolívar—whom
he portrays as a kind, generous, and democratic spirit—not campaigned
against himself in the months from February to May of 1830, which he
 3  BOLÍVAR IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY VENEZUELA  83

alleges he did, he would have been elected president. Physically weak-

ened, Bolívar made a mistake, so Larrazábal’s argument continues. Called
a tyrant on account of his 1828–1830 dictatorship, Bolívar became con-
cerned about his reputation when he should not have. Larrazábal’s specu-
lation does not end there. Larrazábal asserts that had Bolívar continued as
president, the Gran Colombia would not have collapsed and the civil wars
in the decades ahead that visited both the south and center of its vast ter-
ritory when reduced to individual republics would have been avoided.10
But as for who Bolívar is, in the end, classical authorities hold the day.
We are told that had he been a contemporary of Cicero, the Roman leader,
orator, and lawyer, Cicero would have described Bolívar as deserving of a
place in the mansion of the just.11 We are also told of the words of the
Roman general and statesman, Sulla, who speaks of how common it is for
leaders to be mistreated by the peoples they serve after they have left
power.12 Bolívar is in good company, then, but he is not insensitive to the
ingratitude of those he served, in the final scene portrayed as dying not of
a physical ailment but rather, as Larrazábal states, of a broken heart, pro-
foundly wounded in his sensitivity by the “cruel ostracism decreed by the
Congress of Venezuela,” his friends unable to console him sufficiently.13
An ideal mostly for Left-leaning nation construction in Latin America
in the twentieth century, as we saw in the case of Galeano, but also for
visions from the Right, the Gran Colombia in the nineteenth was the sym-
bolic bastion of Venezuela’s Liberal Party, existing as a model to recuper-
ate in a nation founded on its rejection. In the early 1830s, José Tadeo
Monagas moved to resurrect the Gran Colombia as a confederation that
would include his estado de oriente (eastern state) made up of the provinces
of Cumaná, Margarita, and Guayana, in this way contesting Páez’s new
state.14 In the early 1840s, Monagas and Antonio Leocadio Guzmán spoke
of reconstituting the Gran Colombia as a confederation of Venezuela,
Colombia, and Ecuador, at the same time they called for the return of
Bolívar’s body.15 In the 1850s, in the moment of his second presidency,
Monagas sought to establish a Gran Colombia confederation through an
act of congress.16 And at the turn of the twentieth century, in a context
defined by both Colombia and Venezuela, Venezuelan president Cipriano
Castro endeavored to revive it, more serious about this, perhaps, than his
predecessors, sending money to Colombia, where he had once lived, to
support that country’s Liberal Party against the dominant Conservative
Party in what would be known as the War of a Thousand Days
(1899–1902).17 As for Larrazábal, he was operating, then, within a defined
84  R. T. CONN

tradition, offering to the Venezuelan nation a Bolívar who adhered to

republican classical values and who throughout his military career stood
against violence in contrast to Spanish generals who were bloodthirsty,
from Monteverde to Morillo, the execution in 1817 of Policarpa
Salavarrieta (a seamstress who spied for the New Granadan forces of resis-
tance) in Bogotá at the hands of the general Pablo Morillo serving as one
of his prime examples.18 Calling on a multitude of genealogical tropes
from the classical world, Europe, and the United States, he tells us that
Bolívar is like Cincinnatus, the Roman statesman and military leader;
Charlemagne, the leader of the Franks who in the late 700s and early 800s
was the first to unite Western Europe after the fall of the Roman era, creat-
ing the conditions for the new Latin-based national entities that would
arise; George Washington, the general who defeated the British to establish
the US republic; and among other writers and orators the Roman, Cicero.
In short, Bolívar is a great military leader, a wise and virtuous political force
who knows how to take and pursue counsel, particularly with regard to ced-
ing power to civilian authority and congresses at each stage of his military
career, and is also a figure adept at using the written and spoken word.
Simplification in the name of hero construction is the order of the day, as
there is little acknowledgment of the figure who, in fact, governed the Gran
Colombia during Bolívar’s absence in the south, Francisco de Paula
Santander; of the provisional dictatorship Bolívar established in August of
1828 after failing to come to terms with Santander at the Constitutional
Congress two months earlier, in June; or of the assassination attempt on his
life by Liberal opponents associated with Santander and their summary
execution afterwards except to say that Bolívar, in the face of dissension,
lost his nerve when he should not have. In the message promoted, Bolívar
symbolizes plainly and simply leadership, order, peace, and unanimity.
Bolívar’s writings, described, as we have said, as equivalent to the
archeological finds of nineteenth-century Europe, are at the center of
Larrazábal’s reflection. He deploys them in multiple ways to carry forth
his vision, many in function of the binary of the private and the public, and
most having to do with the matter of the sentimental Bolívar he is seeking to
construct, broken heart and all. In one instance of his instrumentalization
of the ­letters, he assigns special importance to the concept of friendship, as
we have seen with the friends who are not able to console Bolívar. Surveying
the letters, Larrazábal cites moments in which Bolívar refers to and speaks
of friendship and others in which he himself can be seen to be acting as
a friend. In another instance, related to the idea of friendship, he argues
 3  BOLÍVAR IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY VENEZUELA  85

that Bolívar is compassionate, even tender—the word “tender” lacing the

pages of the two volumes—as he reviews with the careful eye of a lawyer
the most important incidents in Bolívar’s campaigns and political career
where he has been portrayed as acting only violently and presents evidence
to the contrary. This is how Larrazábal handles the June 15, 1813, Decree
of War to the Death. Presenting the decree as the result of a lack of judg-
ment on the part of Bolívar, Larrazábal goes on to find evidence of acts of
clemency with regard to Bolívar’s application of it and with regard to his
general conduct during the years of 1813–1815. For example, in connec-
tion to Bolívar’s siege of Cartagena’s fort in 1815, his last act before he
departs the mainland, he tells of Bolívar’s efforts to bring about a peaceful
resolution with the commander of the fort from which Bolívar has been
tasked with extracting weaponry for the assault on Santa Marta. This is
Manuel del Castillo who forms part of an independence group that is not
aligned with Bogotá and who, furthermore, despises Bolívar. Not only
does Bolívar write him—we are told—one intimate letter, as Larrazábal
puts it, but he continues to send letters pleading his case, while, at the
same time, ignoring the fact that those letters are going unanswered and
that, more importantly, Castillo has repeatedly insulted him in the incipi-
ent press with the notices he is placing.19 In what has all the characteristics
of a sentimental novel, we see Bolívar turn the other cheek.
In regard to Bolívar-the-letter-writer in relation to the concept of senti-
ment, the author could not have been more a creature of print culture, as
might advise Walter Ong. In his book Orality and Literacy, Ong describes
print culture as opposed to manuscript culture as a technology of sorts
that, building on the classical and Judeo-Christian traditions with the nov-
els of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a culmination, makes
possible the idea of the individual as a subject endowed with interiority.20
Larrazábal promises interiority. Placing Bolívar’s writings in the context
of Venezuela’s literary world, Larrazábal presents Bolívar as offering the
promise of cultivation to the individual who peruses his writings, certain to
learn much from what Bolívar wrote and placed in the press. We imagine an
entire circuit of production and consumption. Bolívar is given to us as an
author, or producer, while his texts are made to appear as so many pieces to
be devoured by subjects formally defined as readers. As for the act of read-
ing, it is also spoken of, presented as providing moral improvement, the
inner life of the individual enriched by intimate contact with the mind and
spirit of the writer. Reading publics existed differently across Europe and the
Americas in the nineteenth century, some, obviously, stronger than others,
and all located in different traditions; but they constituted a shared object of
86  R. T. CONN

reflection for writers, historians, and philosophers who saw in their expan-
sion and refinement a path to modernity. To Venezuela Larrazábal was
offering Bolívar as nothing less than the foundation of a national tradition:
“My readers will find in the correspondence that is being printed a copious
and inexhaustible storehouse of timely reflections: of thoughts full of vitality
and wisdom, of valuable documents of moral and political experience and
teaching, with which men can educate themselves for public life.”21 Settle
back and read Bolívar as one might read Plutarch or Tacitus, he was advising.
In addition to aestheticizing his letters in this way—the foundation of a
humanistic tradition centered not only in classicism, but also in sentiment,
and in particular, the interpersonal act between writer and recipient—
Larrazábal uses them to establish Bolívar’s credentials as a thinker of liber-
alism, charging them with serving as the portal to the rich inner world of
the author, to the truth, in particular, of the identity of Bolívar-the-­
nineteenth-century man. Here were historical documents through which,
when properly seen, can be established the essential figure above and
beyond the claims of his detractors. It is not just that Bolívar was devoutly
republican, calling four constitutional congresses, three during the period
of the Gran Colombia, and that he was averse to occupying positions of
power, Larrazábal repeats throughout his narrative; Bolívar was also com-
mitted more broadly to the democratic and rational ideals of the age,
including, most significantly, abolition, made law in Venezuela in 1854
under the presidency of José Gregorio Monagas and proclaimed in the
United States in 1863 with Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. To
position Bolívar in relation to abolition, so important to the agenda of the
Liberal Party of the Monagas brothers who presided over Venezuela from
1847 to 1858 as presidents, Larrazábal furnishes us with letters of
Alexandre Pétion, the president of Haiti who lent him crucial assistance in
1816. This support, without which it is not clear that independence would
have been achieved in the time frame in which it was, came with a request
for a pledge from Bolívar to end slavery subsequent to independence.22
Two of the letters of Pétion are to Brigade General Ignace Despontreaux
Marion, instructing him to furnish Bolívar with military equipment and
supplies; Larrazábal includes them as evidence of Pétion’s definitive assis-
tance. Another is to Bolívar making the actual request. As for Bolívar’s
response, we are not furnished with a letter, instead via spoken words
relayed by Larrazábal. Larrazábal has Bolívar state that he would have
freed the slaves independently of the request from Pétion. Despite the
 3  BOLÍVAR IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY VENEZUELA  87

complexity of Bolívar’s relationship to Afro-Venezuela, beginning with his

defense in the Jamaica Letter of the rights and privileges of the creole class,
descended from the conquistadors, and his stance subsequent to his 1819
Angostura Address against pardo autonomy on the northern coast of the
Gran Colombia, he is affirming Bolívar’s credentials on the matter of man-
umission. Bolívar created an institutional structure for manumission,
establishing for the Gran Colombia the manumission office. But manu-
mission was, as historian John Lombardi has argued, a process that had a
logic of its own, existing independently of Bolívar just as it did of other
actors who at different times claimed to be the agents of emancipation in
Venezuela. Lombardi tells us what is now well known because of his own
work and that of others, that in the early moments of the independence
movement black slaves were given freedom in exchange for participating
in the militias, first of the royalists, then of the independentists. The con-
text for his reflection on emancipation is Lombardi’s polemic with the
Venezuelan Conservative and Liberal Parties of mid century. By the time
of the 1850s, when Liberals were concerned about Conservative revolu-
tionaries, and also the possibility of the Conservative Party taking from
them the political issue of abolition, the elimination of slavery was just
about a fait accompli. In reality, neither party, he insists, could possibly
have considered defending slavery when 97% of the black population was
free, with children of black women long being born as such and landown-
ers who used slave labor long being compensated by a state-funded manu-
mission group, imperfect and troubling though that group was. In the
end, Lombardi tells us, Monagas was unconcerned about the few remain-
ing slave owners, desirous of being known as the leader who brought
about abolition while not ceding the issue to Conservatives.23
Behind the public, but private world Larrazábal carefully chisels out for
his readers—the foundation of his civilized, emotion-creating Bolívar, of
his imagined reading public, and also of his various constructions of
Bolívar as world leader—is a master text, entirely public in nature from
which the author’s inner, essential Bolívar, the figure defined by his per-
sonal letters, is constructed. That text around which Bolívar’s letters are
assembled—the unacknowledged model for the author’s tome—is the
February 15, 1819, Angostura Address, gently positioned by Larrazábal as
Bolívar’s definitive public work. In this address, Bolívar, having consoli-
dated his power for a second time after failing to hold on to Caracas in
1814 and after receiving essential support from Pétion twice, enumerates
for his audience of soldiers and patrician military leaders the acts that must
88  R. T. CONN

be instituted once independence is achieved. These include emancipating

African-descended slaves, whom he describes as “children of Venezuela,”
uniting Venezuela and New Granada into one state, and compensating
soldiers of his newly constituted armies in a manner befitting fathers of the
nation, a status he promises will be theirs after independence is won, but
one that, as we are told by John Lynch, never came to pass. Caudillos like
Páez refused to distribute lands from the Commission of Sequestered
Property to them.24 In the address, Bolívar also famously outlines the kind
of government that he believes would be most appropriate for a popula-
tion that is emerging from the colonial experience. The governmental
structure of which he speaks is British in inspiration, having the equivalent
of a House of Commons and a House of Lords, is not unlike that of the
United States, having, in addition to a judiciary, an executive, and is
informed by the Athenian institution of the Areopagus and the Roman
censors, having a fourth branch tasked with presiding over education and
morality and charged at the moment of the initiation of the republic with
the one-time responsibility of selecting a cohort of senators for the legis-
lature, there being no clearly constituted aristocratic social class from
which the representatives of property could be taken. Finally, Bolívar pro-
poses, most importantly, a new conception of Latin American identity,
presenting Latin Americans as a blend of skin colors based on the mixing
of African, European, and indigenous peoples, a radical shift from what he
proposes in the Jamaica Letter of 1815, where, as we have said above, he
fashions himself as a leader of a revolutionary movement representing
white creole political and economic interests and prerogatives rooted in
contract theory dating back to the promises by Carlos V to the conquerors.
If Larrazábal goes to Bolívar’s writings and to independence to create a
common way of feeling with Bolívar positioned as author, civilizer, and
precursor of abolition—a figure that in the wake of the Federal War could
create a bond to unite Venezuelans as citizens without saying no to politi-
cal parties—Antonio Guzmán Blanco, son of the founder of the Liberal
Party and former secretary to Liberal military leader and then caudillo
president, Juan Crisóstomo Falcón, would also see value in them.
During the period of his rule over Venezuela from 1870 to 1888,
Guzmán Blanco fashioned Bolívar’s figure into the symbol of his modern
Venezuela. The 1864 constitution that came out of the Federal War elevated
the historic provinces to self-governing states, leaving the central govern-
ment in Caracas weak. The country was now called the United States of
Venezuela. Guzmán Blanco recognized the authority of that constitution,
 3  BOLÍVAR IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY VENEZUELA  89

but he amended it in 1874 with a new constitution, shortening the presi-

dential term to two years and then again more significantly with another
new constitution in 1881, this time reducing the number of states from 20
to 9 and creating a General Council to elect the president. The states
remained sovereign within the Venezuelan nation, but he used his army to
march on different regions of the country to discourage military uprisings.
Guzmán Blanco increased his hold through this measure and his reduction
of the number of states. Also significant was his influence over the generals
who did his bidding during his 19-year rule and who served as president to
create the signs of constitutionalism; and his modernization of the country,
including, most importantly, Caracas.
Regarded as Venezuela’s first modernizer, his many supporters from the
time seeing him as an enlightened or benevolent despot and calling him the
illustrious American, Guzmán Blanco completed the first span of El
Ferrocarril Bolívar (The Bolívar Railroad) in 1877, which opened up com-
mercial possibilities, particularly for Venezuelan copper; significantly
increased the number of primary schools, mandating education; built the
Federal Legislative Palace of Venezuela (the capitol city); established a
national treasury; created a national theater and national academy of lan-
guage; and sought to professionalize the military while reducing the num-
ber of generals who had grown exponentially during the Guerra Federal.
Military uprisings, as we have said, continued to be a concern, as did the
intellectuals who openly critiqued him including Nicanor Bolet Peraza,
director of the Tribuna Liberal (The Liberal Tribune). Military uprisings
undertaken to change the executive had to be treated with seriousness.
Guzmán Blanco, let us remember, had led one. It was a tradition: Monagas
in the 1830s; Páez in the late 1840s; and the caudillo leaders of his time who
sought to unseat him and those who followed in the 1890s such as General
Joaquín Crespo, who occupied the presidency in the 1880s under Guzmán
Blanco and seized it in the 1892 civil war, holding it until 1898. Guzmán
Blanco’s response was not only to undertake to subordinate the military to
civilian authority, but also to exile former and current foes, whether military
or political as his predecessors had, and when not this, to imprison or exe-
cute them. Bolet Peraza, for instance, had to leave the country in 1880.
Importantly, for our narrative, soon after taking Caracas in 1870, having
himself been in exile in Curazao after the fall of Crisóstomo Falcón’s gov-
ernment and the brief return of José Tadeo Monagas to power in 1868, he
exiled Larrazábal. Larrazábal had been an ally of his in the Guerra Federal,
but the writer was now attacking him in the press for murdering a general.25
90  R. T. CONN

This was not all. The year before, in 1870, Larrazábal wrote a public
letter to Guzmán Blanco’s father, reminding him of all that they had
fought for in their battle with the Conservatives.26 Those values—law and
order and peaceful elections—imperfectly embodied though they were by
the Monagas brothers, had been laid waste to by his son when he marched
on Caracas that year. With this, Larrazábal had quickly become a threat,
not only for his direct attacks on the dictator who later would have himself
declared constitutional president, but also for the reason that here was a
Liberal who refused to give up the ideals of freedom of speech and orderly
and peaceful elections. But if exiles could return, as Páez did in 1858 when
the new government lifted the order of exile issued in 1850 by José Tadeo
Monagas and as he himself did when he took Caracas by force, Guzmán
Blanco would not have to be concerned about Larrazábal. He died in
1773 in a shipwreck off the coast of France, en route there to publish his
voluminous papers, including myriad copies of Bolívar’s letters.
Going as far back as the late 1860s, Guzmán Blanco had desired to
remake the public space of the state. In 1872, he removed the arcades that
had surrounded the site of Plaza Bolívar since colonial times. They had
been used for executions. In 1874, four years into his rule, he had an eques-
trian statue of Bolívar erected in Plaza Bolívar, the central plaza that had
received his name in 1842  in the moment his remains were returned to
Caracas. Locals continued to refer to it as Plaza de Armas (Arms Square) or
Plaza del Mercado (Market Square). France provided the model for
Guzmán Blanco’s remodeling of the plaza and for the public architecture
he brought to the state.27 Back from Paris in 1878 after a stint with one of
his generals in the presidency, the Francophile Guzmán Blanco took the
executive position a second time, putting down insurrections. With a new
commitment to using Bolívar’s figure, he exploited it for the major sym-
bolic spaces of the state. His desire in part was to strip the Bolivarian tradi-
tion inherited from his father of its republican bite, and cast aside its
seductive vision of return to a utopic moment of executive power, through
recovery of Bolívar’s rejected person and the Gran Colombia. He had
learned much from the way dates, plazas, statues, and buildings are used in
France to celebrate the country’s heroes and to create a sense of national
cohesion. Wasting no time, Guzmán Blanco renamed the national currency
in 1879 from the venezolano to the bolívar; established in 1880 La Orden
del Libertador (Order of the Liberator) to recognize Venezuelans who
make important contributions to the nation, a continuation of the La
Orden de Los Libertadores (Order of the Liberators) established by Bolívar
 3  BOLÍVAR IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY VENEZUELA  91

in 1813; created a national holiday to commemorate Bolívar’s birth; and

had a National Pantheon built in 1883. For Bolívar’s birthday celebration
in 1883, he invited representatives from Latin American countries. For the
site of the pantheon, he chose that of a colonial church still in ruins from
the 1812 earthquake that was located in the center of Caracas, La Ermita
de la Santísima Trinidad (The Hermitage of the Most Saintly Trinity). The
pantheon was a secular institution, but he rebuilt the church to house it,
thereby taking advantage of religion to produce the effect of spirituality for
a Catholic public, while continuing to undermine the institution of the
Catholic church from which, in the early 1870s, he had taken land. Along
both the left and right naves, he placed monuments memorializing
Venezuelan heroes. But he gave the place of highest distinction to Bolívar,
positioning on the altar an empty sarcophagus to stand for his tomb. Was
this sacrilege? In later years, to boost his popularity before a public that
identified with Bolívar, he transferred to it the Liberator’s remains, held in
the Caracas Cathedral in the Bolívar family mausoleum since the time of
their repatriation from Santa Marta in 1842. Guzmán Blanco also had stat-
ues of himself erected in Caracas, which would be taken down as soon as he
left office, the vast wealth he accumulated protested by students.
The currency is of great interest. Performing the name change at the
beginning of his second term in the executive, having secured new loans for
Venezuela during his time in Europe, he did something few leaders have
thought to do: use a “founding father” not just to visually consecrate the bills
and coins of a currency, but also, and most significantly, to define the cur-
rency itself. As for the ideological payoff he hoped to achieve, he could not
have been more ambitious: externally, on the world market, the prestige of
Bolívar’s name would lend credibility to Venezuela; internally, the intimate
association of Bolívar’s figure with the instrument used by the masses to fulfill
their material needs and desires would encourage identification with the state.
Guzmán Blanco not only created dates but also repurposed them.
One major date redefined was, as historian Carole Leal Curiel explains,
Venezuela’s April 19, 1810, the day on which Venezuela’s junta
pledged allegiance to Fernando VII and which the new republic had
made a Catholic holiday. During the Guzmán Blanco period, it was
recast in Bolivarian terms and reimagined as the beginning of an 1810
Liberal revolution with Bolívar as leader, the facts of the junta
­completely erased from view, and over time so institutionalized as such
that a Venezuelan historian in 1960 presented the date as representing
“our emancipation.”28 Guzmán Blanco had now placed Bolívar at the
92  R. T. CONN

“beginning” of the Venezuelan republic, no longer the figure exiled

whose ideals were available to be recuperated, but now a leader per-
fectly aligned with the state and digestible in a new way by the
Venezuelan and world public. The Catholic Church, whose authority
he was diminishing, could not, and did not, protest.
In addition to this sleight of hand, which would have major conse-
quences for Venezuelan politics as well as for the Latin American hemi-
spheric tradition, which now had a Bolivarian Venezuelan 1810 deployable
for distinct purposes, Guzmán Blanco eyed the United States, just as
Larrazábal had, seeking to draw political capital for Caracas and himself
from the act of erecting a statue in honor of the US hero of independence
and first president, George Washington. This was all part of his reinstru-
mentalization of the period of independence in the year of the celebration
of Bolívar’s birthday. Washington and Bolívar were now equivalent, both
fathers of their respective nations. In the moment of the dedication, he
thanked the United States for its recognition of Venezuela (President
James Monroe in fact recognized the Gran Colombia as Venezuela did
not exist as a state). There was much symbolic value gained. A Bolívar
who represented 1810 and the Liberal Revolution modeled on Washington
could encourage traders in the North Atlantic to regard Caracas as a capi-
tal in the way they regarded that of the United States. It could also
encourage them and others to consider Venezuela a country freed of the
logic of civil wars. Guzmán Blanco had made Bolívar into a leader who
like Washington rose above political parties to stabilize the nation. But
Bolívar was hardly Washington, participating in the hard-nosed politics of
his moment and only able to govern by granting Páez authority over
Venezuela on January 1, 1827, with himself declaring a dictatorship in
the Gran Colombia’s capital, Bogotá, in 1828.
Still, as many things as Guzmán Blanco transformed into Bolivarian
emblems, he did not turn everything connected to the Bolívar legacy into a
symbol or measure designed to expand the reach and authority of the state.
Some elements, such as the urban home the Bolívar family occupied until
1792, which he purchased from the Madriz family in 1876 and rented out
to distinguished foreign merchants, remained in his hands alone. Finally, in
what would be perhaps his most important act for the purpose of making
Bolívar available to Venezuela’s intellectuals of future decades, he ordered
the publication of the Bolívar documents collected by Daniel Florencio
O’Leary, the Irish adventurer who became Bolívar’s most loyal aide-de-
camp and who was promoted to the rank of general in 1830.
 3  BOLÍVAR IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY VENEZUELA  93

The story of O’Leary’s 32-volume collection of Bolívar’s correspon-

dence, his political writings, and his own Memorias, a major source for
scholarship on Bolívar and the period of independence, is one of an afterlife
in the making. Bolívar, in the moment his health was failing, asked O’Leary
to write his biography, and to burn his letters. Implicit in that request, that
his life be represented in print, was that O’Leary would defend him against
his detractors, particularly against those bent on portraying him as a dicta-
tor on the order of Napoleon. O’Leary composed Bolívar’s Memorias, but
he hardly honored Bolívar’s request to destroy the papers, doing just the
opposite. In exile in Jamaica in 1830, the year of Bolívar’s political decline
and death, and after his clash in the 1829 battle of El Santuario,29 he set
out on a mission to collect them. It was a vast undertaking. From Bolívar’s
interlocutors, O’Leary obtained original copies, including ones from for-
mer nemeses such as Spanish General Pablo Morillo, figures whom he had
occasion to meet in his capacity as secretary to former Venezuelan generals
Carlos Soublette and Mariano Montilla in their European missions in the
1830s and 1840s. As for the biography, O’Leary qualified the Memorias as
an “eyewitness account,” using the authority of the rhetorical position of
the witness to portray Bolívar as an internationally minded Enlightenment
figure who never veered from constitutional process. O’Leary would not
be the one to bring out the collection of documents, however, dying in
1854 and leaving his son, whom he had named for the Liberator, Simón
B. O’Leary, with the task of completing the massive editorial project.
Simón B. fulfilled the mission but not until years later, at the time of
Guzmán Blanco’s authorization for the correspondence, political writings,
and Memorias to be put into print. The volumes came out between 1879
and 1888 under the direction of a government-financed editorial staff,
with Guzmán Blanco’s name plastered on the title page of each of the 32
volumes, 3 containing the Memorias. After publication, in 1888, they
were incorporated on the instructions of President Juan Pablo Rojas Paúl
into the Archivo del Libertador established by the National Academy
of History.
The battle over Bolívar’s letters and documents was in full gear. Larrazábal
had incorporated into his history copies of his own—a fraction of the thou-
sands he had been collecting since his youth and intended to publish in
Paris—to make Bolívar available to the Venezuelan and international public
as a figure signifying nineteenth-century liberalism in the framework of clas-
sicism and his excoriation of the Spanish. He had done this in competition
with other letter collectors who were defining a new genre—the publication
94  R. T. CONN

of individual Bolívar letters serving as an opportunity to use the leader’s

own voice to define him and independence—and, more generally, in com-
petition with other Venezuelan public figures, the same ones of whom
Carrera Damas speaks that also included Larrazábal himself, and who drew
upon the private collections to which they had access.
With the publication of the O’Leary volumes, all this hardly changed.
To the contrary, it reinforced this tradition, serving to elevate the act of
quoting, collecting, editing, and commenting upon Bolívar’s writings as
so many Venezuelan prerogatives for engagement in the public sphere
while creating the possibility for a form of national history based on one
figure, there being a seemingly inexhaustible archive from which one
could draw to define the boundaries of a profession and a tradition. This
is the world that Hugo Chávez inherited when, in 2007, he asserted that
Bolívar did not die of tuberculosis but was assassinated in his prime by the
elites who saw their local capitalist interests threatened by him and his
state, offering as material proof of this one of Bolívar’s final letters. That
letter was penned by Bolívar to his closest of allies, General Rafael Urdaneta
and José María Vergara, on September 25, 1830, just three weeks after
Urdaneta’s coup of September 4, 1830. How, so went Chávez’s reason-
ing, could Bolívar have been ill if at this late date in 1830 he was capable,
as Bolívar said he was at the end of the letter, of returning to the fold,
never mind of penning the letter itself? Chávez, who would bring out his
own collection of Bolívar letters at the London publishing house Verso
Books, was harnessing Bolívar’s writings to support his thesis of a healthy
body misrepresented by the oligarchic nation as tubercular.30

Notes
1. John Lombardi, The Decline and Abolition of Negro Slavery in Venezuela,
1820–1854 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Incorporation, 1971),
96–97.
2. German Carrera Damas, El culto a Bolívar; esbozo para un estudio de las
ideas en Venezuela (Caracas: Alfadil Ediciones, 2003), 282–285.
3. See Mariano Picón Salas: Viejos y Nuevos Mundos, Ed. Guillermo Sucre
(Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1983), 560–562. I am citing from the
essay “Regreso de tres mundos: un hombre en su generación,” originally
published in 1959 as a book (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica).
4. Rufino Blanco Fombona states in the prologue to his modernized edition
of Larrazábal’s La vida y correspondencia general del libertador Simón
Bolívar; enriquecida con la inserción de los manifiestos, mensages, exposiciones,
 3  BOLÍVAR IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY VENEZUELA  95

proclamas, &. &. of 1918 (Madrid: Editorial-América), that, given the

length and complexity of the two-volume history, Larrazábal must have
been working on his history since the 1850s.
5. Felipe Larrazábal, La vida y correspondencia general del libertador Simón
Bolívar; enriquecida con la inserción de los manifiestos, mensages, exposicio-
nes, proclamas, &. &., Vol. 1 (New York: E.O. Jenkins, 1865), 338–339.
6. Felipe Larrazábal, 1987, La vida y correspondencia general del libertador
Simón Bolívar; enriquecida con la inserción de los manifiestos, mensages,
exposiciones, proclamas, &. &., Vols. 1 and 2 (Nueva York: D. Appleton y
Compañia).
7. Ibid., vii.
8. Ibid., 229.
9. Ibid., 490. “República … gobernada según las bases de la política mod-
erna, cuyos principios capitales son la división y el equilibrio de los
poderes.”
10. Felipe Larrazábal, La vida y correspondencia general del libertador Simón
Bolívar; enriquecida con la inserción de los manifiestos, mensages, exposicio-
nes, proclamas, &. &., Vol. 2 (New York: E.O. Jenkins, 1865), 587.
11. Ibid., 588.
12. Idem.
13. Ibid., 588.
14. See José Gil Fortoul, who writes that the opposition party under Monagas
and Gabante claimed to represent the values of the Gran Colombia
between 1831 and 1833. José Gil Fortoul, Tomo segundo. Historia consti-
tucional de Venezuela. La oligarquía conservadora. La oligarquía conserva-
dora (Berlin: Carl Heymann, 1909), 177. Also see page 39.
15. Bolívar’s remains were moved from Santa Marta to Caracas in 1842.
16. Gil Fortoul writes that in early 1856 José Tadeo Gregorio, determined to
remain in power beyond his term limit, proposed establishing a new con-
federation of the Gran Colombia. This would mean changing the constitu-
tion such that he would have a lifetime appointment as head of Venezuela
and prevent his brother Gregorio from alternating with him. On February
27, the congress approved his proposal, authorizing the state to invite New
Granada and Ecuador to confederate. José Gil Fortoul, Tomo segundo.
Historia constitucional de Venezuela. La oligarquía conservadora. La oligar-
quía conservadora (Berlin: Carl Heymann, 1909), 309. On April 4, 1856,
Venezuelans Castelli and Villafañe submitted a proposal to reintegrate the
Gran Colombia to their New Granadan counterparts, a proposal that was
then presented to the New Granadan senate. New Granada responded,
asking that they modify their definition of the proposed Union to conform
to their vision of regional or federal autonomy. José Gil Fortoul, Tomo
segundo. Historia constitucional de Venezuela. La oligarquía conservadora.
La oligarquía conservadora (Berlin: Carl Heymann, 1909), 454–455.
96  R. T. CONN

17. Carlos Vidales, “Cipriano Castro y la Gran Colombia,” accessed September

23, 2018, Historia y Región, http://historiayregion.blogspot.com/2017/12/
cipriano-castro-y-la-grancolombia.html.
18. Felipe, Larrazábal, La vida y correspondencia general del libertador Simón
Bolívar; enriquecida con la inserción de los manifiestos, mensages, exposicio-
nes, proclamas, &. &. (New York: E.O. Jenkins, 1865), 499.
19. Felipe Larrazábal, La vida y correspondencia general del libertador Simón
Bolívar; enriquecida con la inserción de los manifiestos, mensages, exposicio-
nes, proclamas, &. &., Vol. 1 (New York: E.O. Jenkins, 1865), 361.
20. See in particular, Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: the technologizing of the
word (London: Routledge, 1991), 151–155.
21. Ibid., xix–xx. “Mis lectores hallarán en la correspondencia que se da a la
estampa, un caudal copioso, inagotable, de oportunas reflexiones: de pens-
amientos llenos de jugo y de doctrina, de documentos preciosos de experi-
encia y enseñanza moral y política, com que pueden formarse hombres
para la vida pública.”
22. Ibid., 410–421.
23. Lombardi, 1971, The Decline and Abolition of Negro Slavery in Venezuela,
1820–1854, 141–142.
24. See John Lynch, Lynch, John. The Spanish American Revolutions, 1808–
1826 (N.Y.: W. W. Norton and Co., 1986), 157–158.
25. Felipe Larrazábal, Asesinato del general Salazar: individual y verídica rel-
ación de este horrendo crimen, perpetrado en Tinaquillo el 17 de mayo de
1872, por el general Antonio Guzmán Blanco (Baranquilla: Imprenta de los
Andes, 1873).
26. Idem.
27. See Rafael Sánchez, Dancing Jacobins: A Venezuelan Genealogy of Latin
American Populism (N.Y.: Fordham University Press, 2016) for penetrat-
ing readings of these changes to the built environment.
28. Carole Leal Curiel, “El 19 de abril de 1810: ‘La Mascarada de Fernando’
como fecha fundacional de la independencia de Venezuela,” in Mitos políti-
cos en las sociedades andinas: orígenes, invenciones y ficciones, eds. Germán
Carrera Damas et al. (Caracas: Editorial Equinoccio, 2006), 65–91.
29. See Matthew Brown, The Struggle for Power in Post-Independence
Colombia and Venezuela, (N.Y.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
30. Hugo Chávez, blog entry, December 16, 2010, accessed July 2019,
http://blog.chavez.org.ve/temas/libros/asi-murio-bolivar/#.
XTz981BJn-Y (Even after exhuming Bolívar’s remains, Chávez would
continue to use correspondence as proof that Bolívar had not been ill. Had
he been suffering from the late stages of tuberculosis, Bolívar, according to
Chávez, would not have had the strength to breathe let alone write a letter,
travel, or serve a country. Looking at the letters, it would have made more
sense for Chávez to focus on Bolívar’s letter to Juan José Flores dated
 3  BOLÍVAR IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY VENEZUELA  97

November 9, 1830, in which Bolívar indicates a desire to run for president.

He would be dead in less than a month.)
For an impressive and thorough study of Bolívar’s and Urdaneta’s cor-
respondence in the context of Bolívar returning to power, please see:
Álvaro Acevedo Tarazona and Carlos Iván Villamizar, “El último Bolívar:
renuncia y retiro del ejercicio del poder (1829–1830) Entre la autoridad y
la legalidad,” Historia Y Memoria, Núm. 11 (2015): 213–232.
For Chávez’s collection of Bolívar’s letters, please see: Simón Bolívar,
Hugo Chávez Presents Símon Bolívar: The Bolivarian Revolution, Ed.
Matthew Brown (London: Verso, 2009).
 CHAPTER 4

José Martí and Venezuela: Redressing

Bolivarian Doctrine

If New York City provided Felipe Larrazábal with the possibility of put-
ting into print his liberal, classical vision of Bolívar, it continued to play a
role for Venezuelans in the decades ahead. During the Antonio Guzmán
Blanco period of the 1870s and 1880s, political and military leaders who
challenged the great modernizer found refuge in New York City, follow-
ing in this way not only the path of Larrazábal, but also that of the ex-
president of Venezuela and liberator José Antonio Páez who returned to
New York City after the Guerra Federal (Federal War) and died there in
1873. In the end, many stayed, never returning. Among those who did
return, some would do so in the 1890s when, after the end of Guzmán
Blanco’s rule, the federal states gained more authority, the legislature of
the state of Zulia, for instance, even re-swearing the 1864 constitution
which Guzmán Blanco had replaced with two successive constitutions
reducing presidential term limits to two years, with the debate over the
constitutions the initial cause of the 1892 Revolución Legalista (Legalist
Revolution). They would also return in the moment of the Revolución
Libertadora of 1901–1903 (The Liberating Revolution). In this,
Venezuela’s last civil war and bloodiest after the Guerra Federal, they
would join Cipriano Castro who in 1899 successfully marched on Caracas
in order to centralize the state, as he avowed. Or, they would join Manuel
Antonio Matos. One of the wealthiest men in Latin America at the time,
Matos had established an economic dynasty over the decades with strong
connections to Guzmán Blanco through marriage and in the late 1890s

© The Author(s) 2020 99

R. T. Conn, Bolívar’s Afterlife in the Americas,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26218-1_4
100  R. T. CONN

was at the peak of his economic and political dominance. He allied with
the multinational companies with which the Venezuelan state had been
doing business to try to topple Castro and restore the banking system he
presided over. He failed.
The 1880s and early 1890s is the time period that interests us in this
chapter. In New York City, Venezuelans also associated themselves with
republicans from other Latin American countries. One was José Martí, the
writer and journalist who would be at the forefront of the Cuban libera-
tion movement and who lived in exile in New  York City from 1880 to
1895. That association made for a new and definitive moment in the story
of Bolívar’s afterlife in the Americas.
Martí had constant contact with the Venezuelan exilic community from
the time of his arrival. Inspired by its members, including Venezuelan poli-
tician and newspaper owner Nicanor Bolet Peraza, and desirous of seeing
the new Venezuela, with its incipient railroad and new public buildings, he
visited the country in 1881, where he founded the Revista Venezolana
(Venezuelan Review). During this time, Martí learned much about
Venezuelan history and about Bolívar. Through his literary magazine, he
collaborated with intellectuals and artists and published articles of his
own. We mentioned in Chap. 1 his article on Venezuelan humanist Cecilio
Acosta, which resulted in his being expelled from the country after he
refused Guzmán Blanco’s request that he write a laudatory article about
him as well. In New York City, just a few years later, in 1887, Martí
founded the Sociedad Literaria Hispano-Americana de Nueva York (the
Literary Hispanic American Society of New York) with Bolet Peraza. Bolet
Peraza, who was married to a daughter of José Gregorio Monagas, had
sought to unseat the successor of Guzmán Blanco in the 1870s by bring-
ing back to the country Venezuelan exiles. But Guzmán Blanco returned
from Paris and prevailed, driving the owner of the Tribuna Liberal (Liberal
Tribune) out of the country in 1880. Through his associations with Bolet
Peraza and others, Martí became a Venezuelan cultural insider. In 1890,
he penned a portrait of José Antonio Páez on the occasion of the proces-
sion celebrating the repatriation of his remains, two years after the end of
Guzmán Blanco’s 20-year rule and 17 years after Páez had passed.
Subsequent to the Battle of Ayacucho, Bolívar made statements indi-
cating his desire to direct his Colombian Liberation Army to the Caribbean,
particularly to Cuba. Had the interests of the metropolitan powers, the
status of the territories liberated by Bolívar, and the finances of the Gran
Colombia been different between 1825 and 1827, he may well have
 4  JOSÉ MARTÍ AND VENEZUELA: REDRESSING BOLIVARIAN DOCTRINE  101

c­ arried out that mission. Instead, lacking funds and warned by the United
States not to take the independence movement north, Bolívar made the
decision not to do so, his concern that the islands could be used by the
Holy Alliance—French troops had invaded Spain in 1823 to restore abso-
lute monarchy, leaving 40,000 forces in place—to mount a reconquest not
great enough for him to go forward. He was also in communication with
Mexico, which made statements to the same effect but which, according
to the Venezuelan historian José Gil Fortoul, of whom we will speak in the
next chapter, let the initiative die in its legislative system. Bolívar’s state-
ments, however, were not forgotten. Martí, as he worked with Bolívar’s
political texts and letters after his experience in Venezuela, came upon them.
The Caribbean narrative appeared later in Martí’s intellectual produc-
tion. We see it in his 1890 portrait of Páez, where he eulogizes him as a
supporter of the expedition, placing his commitment among the military
and political acts and events that defined his career. He explains that had
it not been for the mutiny of the Granadan military man José Bustamente
on January 26, 1827 that Páez’s battalion, Junín, had to put down, as well
as statements from Washington, D.C. that it would not allow Cuba’s sta-
tus to change, the liberation of Cuba would have been added to the great
heroic acts of independence.1 We also see it at the time of the celebration
of Bolívar’s 110th birthday on October 28, 1893, held at the Hispanic
American Literary Society of New York of which Martí had not only been
a founder, but also a president and inspired by the Venezuelan community.
Martí gave a major speech on Bolívar at the event, a speech that will be at
the center of our reflection, addressing Latin American diplomats, busi-
nessmen, and their wives. Reporting on the celebration, he wrote in the
October issue of the new political weekly he directed, Patria (Fatherland):
“Cubans will always think of [Bolívar] arranging with Sucre the expedi-
tion, which never arrived, to free Cuba.”2 In these, his final years in New
York City, Martí thus added the Hispanophone Caribbean, which in the
mid-1820s was momentarily on the map of hemispheric liberation, to the
major sites of reflection about Bolívar’s legacy, including that of the Gran
Colombia and that of the Federation of the Andes, the latter a pipedream,
perhaps, that nevertheless acquired mythic proportions not unlike the
Gran Colombia.
Through his travels and readings, Martí became something of an expert
on the different sites of Latin American independence. His writings are
full of portraits of leaders from that period, some full-fledged treatments
in three to four pages, others snapshots inserted strategically in reflections
102  R. T. CONN

on other figures or topics. We are introduced to Father Miguel Hidalgo

who in 1810 marched with indigenous and mestizo masses on Mexico
City to rid New Spain of Spanish rule and bring about a social revolution,
and who shortly after was executed; and to José de San Martín, the gen-
eral who led the independence movement in Río de la Plata, Chile, and
Peru and who at his famous meeting with Bolívar at Guayaqul in 1822
ceded to him authority over the independence movement in South
America. We should not be surprised by Martí’s intense interest in the
leaders of independence. It stands to reason that an intellectual of his tal-
ents, committed to bringing about the liberation of his country and to
promoting models of modernization compatible with a Latin America he
conceived as having a spirit different from that of the United States, would
want to learn as much as he could about the figures and processes that
gave birth to the republican states, this at a time when Latin American
states were themselves going to these actors to establish cultural founda-
tions upon which to solidify and legitimize themselves. Martí saw this
firsthand in Venezuela and in Mexico, which he also visited. For Martí,
Father Hidalgo will be the most exemplary of the leaders, fighting for the
popular classes and executed for that reason—a figure he contrasted with
Mexico’s Agustín de Iturbide.
Martí had plenty of sources to draw on for his cultural work involving
Bolívar. One was Felipe Larrazábal’s 1865 La vida y correspondencia gen-
eral del libertador Simón Bolívar (The Life and General Correspondence of
the Liberator Simón Bolívar)—with its multiple printings in the US city.3
Larrazábal had sought to build a Venezuelan national identity by opposing
Venezuelans to Spaniards and underlining Spanish cruelty on the part of
the monarchy’s generals while disassociating Bolívar from the War to the
Death, all this through classicism and in the romantic key of sentimental-
ity. Martí sent the epic organized by Larrazábal and that was a Bible for
the Venezuelan exilic community in New York City in a new direction. He
used the materials gathered in his history to produce narratives about divi-
sion within Latin America. In some instances, Martí spoke of the impor-
tance of rising above that division by finding ways to accept conflicts and
differences without going to war or expelling leaders.
For Martí, the conduct of Spaniards was not the issue, then, but rather,
with his interest in establishing and fortifying the building blocks of the Latin
American republics, that of Latin Americans themselves, including Bolívar.
Inspired by the ending Larrazábal constructed for Bolívar’s life, Martí would
also say in an important essay that the Liberator died of a broken heart.
 4  JOSÉ MARTÍ AND VENEZUELA: REDRESSING BOLIVARIAN DOCTRINE  103

In 1883, recently back from Caracas, Martí threw himself into the
Venezuelan political arena. It was the year of the centenary of Bolívar’s
birth, celebrated with great fanfare in Venezuela and other countries in the
Americas with ceremonies in Caracas held to distribute Bolívar medallions
to actors across the different spaces of society and with participation of the
Bolivarian republics, including Bolivia, which also held its own festivities
in La Paz.4 The exact occasion for his intervention was the state’s erection
of a statue of Bolívar at the then Central University of Venezuela that had
once been the San Francisco Convent, sculpted by the Venezuelan Rafael
de la Cova, who would go on to produce the first Bolívar statue to sit in
New York City’s Central Park. Capitalizing on the moment, Martí in an
article for a Spanish-language newspaper in New York City presented the
form of it, that of a statesman standing rather than the general on horse-
back, as reflecting the political values communicated by Bolívar in the
January 2, 1814, address he delivered at a popular assembly at the convent.5
As Martí carefully explains, not all iterations of Bolívar’s figure are
equal. Contrasting the Bolívar of this address with the one from which he
indicates he is distancing himself, that of the military leader who was dicta-
tor, he submits that this Bolívar of January 2, 1814, was something other
than what he might appear to be. Bolívar, recently appointed dictator by
the assembly he convened, expresses his profound anguish at not being
able to hand over the reins of government to the “citizens,” the Spanish
continuing to threaten his recently established Second Republic. He vows
to conduct himself not like Pisistratus or like Sulla, but like, he insinuates,
Cincinnatus, exemplary not for his acts in power but for the utter detach-
ment with which he relinquishes his authority, returning to private life and
remaining there.6 Here was the Bolívar to recover and emulate, Martí
communicates to his readers, the leader who considered himself to be
responsible to the people, bound by a contract after he was appointed, a
Bolívar, in other words, who could be instructive to Guzmán Blanco who
took Caracas by force in 1870 and in 1877 had the Congress vote him
president.
New York City also saw a centenary celebration in 1883. It was held at
the elegant Delmónico restaurant and attended by Latin American diplo-
matic, professional, and artistic elites. In reporting on it in August of that
year, the ever-versatile Martí who was already making a career with literary
pieces such as “Coney Island” in December of 1881 and “El puente de
Brooklyn” (“The Brooklyn Bridge”) in June of 1883, out of the symbol-
ism of place, now focused on a NYC restaurant that dated back to the
104  R. T. CONN

beginnings of the century with multiple locations in the 1880s. He speaks

less of Bolívar than of the warm and convivial assembly of individuals from
different Latin American countries gathered at the restaurant. Martí
meticulously describes them as he tells his readers how they delight in one
another’s company. The culmination is the final toasts to the distinguished
father of Latin American independence, the words of tribute quoted and
paraphrased by Martí, including those of members of the New York City
elites also in attendance, who, as Martí informs his readers, properly com-
pared Bolívar to Washington.7
Martí, after the 1883 hemispheric celebration of Bolívar’s figure, knew
that he could not allow Bolívar to escape his rhetorical clutches—his sym-
bolism alive in the Americas. Martí was generally consistent in his view of
Bolívar. But Bolívar for him was also a highly adaptable symbol, one that
he placed side by side now, as we see here, with Washington; now with the
British academic Herbert Spencer, as he does in his famous 1889 piece
“Madre America” (“Mother America”) with Bolívar representing the
power of arms and Spencer the power of education; now with the Argentine
liberator San Martín, who appears in different ways, praised for his deci-
sion in 1822 in Guayaquil to cede his military command to Bolívar and
also criticized as a monarchical figure with an ideology that was inflexible;
and, as we have also seen above, now with Sucre. Most notable among
Martí’s interventions in which he engages with Bolívar, though, is the
Simón Bolívar address of which we have spoken. Martí was right in the
midst of his military planning to liberate Cuba, having already appointed
Máximo Gómez Báez as commander of the military movement, and hav-
ing traveled throughout the Caribbean and to Mexico for organizational
purposes. A year and a half later he, Gómez, and other members of the
expeditionary forces would land on Cuban shores.
In his war of words with both Cuban and US American annexationists,
Martí had held the position that Cuba should free itself without US assis-
tance, identifying US intervention with the cause of his annexationist ene-
mies. He was also mindful that in the previous context of the War of Ten
Years (1868–1878), which saw the Spanish send him to hard labor in a
rock quarry for publishing a piece in favor of independence, then exile him
to Spain, the United States had failed to come to the aid of Cuba’s inde-
pendence fighters.8
In the address, Martí remains true to the principle that Cuba must free
itself, making no pleas for assistance from the United States, as one would
expect he would not, and making no formal pleas to Latin American
 4  JOSÉ MARTÍ AND VENEZUELA: REDRESSING BOLIVARIAN DOCTRINE  105

republics either, skirting reference, for instance, to Bolívar’s and Sucre’s

expedition plans, including the subsequent joint effort that the Gran
Colombia and Mexico briefly considered. He also avoids a theme that is a
constant in other writings of his—US designs on Latin America. Instead,
going back in time to the period of independence and there laying out
before his audience the vast region in the moment of its transition from
colonies to republics, Martí takes Cuba temporarily out of the North-­
South binary to place it at the center of a Latin American historical narra-
tive unadulterated by contact with the United States.
This, let us underline, is unusual, since the Cuban exile repeatedly
warned of the danger of US-North America cultural and economic influ-
ence in Latin America, and did so particularly strongly after the United
States convened the first Pan American Conference in Washington, D.C. in
1889. Diplomats from the Latin American republics were asked by their
hosts to consider material and institutional ways to connect “north” and
“south,” including the possibility of a common currency. In his famous
1891 essay, “Nuestra America” (“Our America”), Martí, responding in
part to that conference, used the rhetorical trope of what is natural and
original in opposition to what is artificial and foreign to urge Latin
Americans to create governmental forms that meet the needs of their peo-
ples and to establish strong academic traditions to develop their countries
and protect themselves against foreign influence. He had sharp words of
criticism for those among them who benefited from the global order of the
times, those able to travel outside Latin America without a thought for the
well-­being of their own people or those who immigrated to the United
States to assimilate. At the same time, he declared that the people of a
country have a right to remove leaders who, not understanding the mod-
erating force of the popular soul, create forms of government that do not
meet the needs of the people. The proper form of government cannot
come from Europe or the United States, but must be the product of a
nation’s own evolutionary process. “Government must be born of the
country.”9
In his essays, Martí often speaks of the colossus of the north. But from
his earliest moments in New York, he was concerned with another colos-
sus as well, Bolívar’s Latin American state—in the first instance, the Gran
Colombia. As we saw in the previous chapter, Bolívar’s Gran Colombia
continued to operate discursively in Venezuela’s nineteenth century. It
was at the center of Larrazábal’s narrative.
Martí reflected on this pan-national entity in an 1881 biographical
sketch of the jurist, public administrator, and leader Miguel Peña that he
106  R. T. CONN

produced during his visit to Venezuela and published in the first of the two
issues of the Revista Venezolana (Venezuelan Review). The sketch is typical
of the numerous narrative portraits he penned during his life. Martí praises
the Venezuelan precisely for speaking “truth to power,” whether that
power was Francisco de Paula Santander, the Granadan elite of which
Santander formed part, Bolívar, or Páez, or for outsmarting the Spanish
Commander Juan Domingo de Monteverde and the royalist leader José
Tomás Boves. Producing the sketch in the moment that the long-deceased
Venezuelan was being honored with a special monument at his gravesite in
his hometown of Valencia—the center of the movement of Venezuelan
independence from the Gran Colombia that began in 1826—Martí reflects
upon the “multinational” union that was the Gran Colombia. He provides
five facets of Peña’s fascinating life: the colonial world (rapporteur on the
Royal Court); independence (political leader, administrator, delegate); the
Gran Colombia (jurist on the High Court of Justice of the Gran Colombia);
the break from the Gran Colombia known as the Cosiata (advisor to
Páez); and the new republic of Venezuela (legislator).10 Martí explains that
the polity of the Gran Colombia made it inevitable that the Granadans and
Venezuelans would find themselves in a power struggle. How could they
not, after all, if the capital was located in Bogotá and the decision for that
location had been made, as he said it was (contrary to what the US histo-
rian John Lynch tells us) at the Congress of Cúcuta, Cúcuta a Granadan
city? Martí writes: “At that time, neither Venezuelans enjoyed being
ordered by Granadans, nor the latter seeing the former in their own terri-
tory; Colombia’s vice president cared less about being the lieutenant of an
expanded people than about being the capitan of his own. Santander
complained about Caracas, and about Peña; Peña about Bogotá and about
Santander.”11
He goes on to illustrate the “national” conflict at the center of the Gran
Colombia by retelling the story of a Venezuelan liberator—a plainsman
who was a war hero, credited with saving Bolívar’s life on one occasion, and
who crossed the Andes into Boyacá in 1819. His name was Leonardo
Infante. Infante was a pardo whose nickname was el Negro Infante (the
Black Infante). Retired as a colonel, he resided in the white neighborhood
of San Victorino. Living large, according to Martí, he was known to all. His
outsized personality, as Martí recounts the story, humiliated a community
that could not abide the presence of a black man, never mind a black man
who had not internalized the racial hierarchy of Bogotá. When the body of
 4  JOSÉ MARTÍ AND VENEZUELA: REDRESSING BOLIVARIAN DOCTRINE  107

a lieutenant by the name of Francisco Perdomo was found in a river in

Bogotá on July 24, 1824, Santander and the Granadan elites sprang into
action, accusing Infante. Forget the juridical process. As Martí recounts in
dramatic detail, Infante was condemned by public opinion first and then,
despite the lack of any eyewitness accounts, found guilty by the judges who
sat on the High Court of Justice of which Peña was president. To no avail
was the energetic defense made up to the last minute by Peña, who went so
far as to refuse to certify the death sentence reached by the majority of the
judges. Two had found Infante guilty, ordering the death penalty; one
guilty, ordering prison; two others not guilty; and a sixth judge, afforced to
break the tie, guilty, finding in favor of the death penalty. Santander exe-
cuted Infante without delay, on March 26, 1825.12 A public statement
from Santander followed as he expressed his great satisfaction that military
men could now know that they had to act in accordance with the rules of
civil society.
Peña, too, was to suffer, though not with his life. His refusal to approve
the majority verdict resulted in a charge before the Senate of the Gran
Colombia. The Senate voted to suspend him from his position for a year
without pay. Angry and frustrated, Peña concluded that justice cannot be
had in Bogotá and returned to Venezuela. Martí agreed.
But if Martí was calling into question the “law” of Santander by point-
ing to his machinations behind the scenes and for his inability to see him-
self as leader of the entire territory of the Gran Colombia, his objective is
not only to target Santander. Indeed, the issue is the possibility itself of the
Gran Colombia. With its three departments corresponding to New
Granada, Venezuela, and Ecuador, as Martí emphasizes with his discussion
of the first two, the state was too big for its own good. The proof was the
Infante case, which demonstrated, as far as Martí was concerned, how the
state apparatus of the Gran Colombia, located as it was in Bogotá where
one geo-political constituency dominated, could not be trusted to protect
the rights of individuals from another region, in this case a black hero of
independence from Venezuela. As for the reaction of Venezuelan leaders,
what they saw in Leonardo Infante was a fellow citizen persecuted in a
state apparatus from which they themselves wanted to secede and whom
they were quick, then, to make, as they did, into a cause celèbre.13
Peña was now advisor to Páez, who was supposed to go to Bogotá to
appear before the Senate for the reason that he had disobeyed orders to send
50,000 soldiers to the region. Peña recommended he not, lest he be jailed.
Three months after the execution, Páez, acting at least in part on that advice,
108  R. T. CONN

declared he would no longer take orders from Bogotá. Martí was nimble on
his feet, seizing upon the occasion of a tribute to return to an important
moment that fueled the beginnings of the separatist movement in Caracas to
sing the praises of one such as Peña who had the courage to stand up to the
governmental institutions of the Gran Colombia in which he was a key player
to defend a fellow citizen.
But there was more, as Peña, we are told, is not without fault either.
Through the transition from the Gran Colombia to the Republic of
Venezuela, Martí continues to praise Peña, pointing to the counsel he
gave Páez during the years of the separation. That counsel was for Páez to
keep his focus on the matter of Granadans’ violation of the republic’s laws
and to resist attacking Bolívar and others. Ultimately, though, Peña, after
the formation of the new republic, with himself a member of the new leg-
islature, committed his own error of judgment, signing to his future disre-
pute, Martí states, the decree that Bolívar be exiled from Venezuela, just
as he had signed the order in 1812 in his capacity as administrator of the
Port of La Guaira for Francisco de Miranda to be turned into the Spanish.14
Peña, as we are seeing, was an important figure in the period of change
from the empire to the Gran Colombia and then to the Republic of
Venezuela—he is everywhere, it would seem. Yet, he had violated a major
principle for Martí—that Latin Americans, in the heated contests of war
and political battle, express understanding for one another. Miranda had
received no such consideration—an older man at the time who did not
deserve to be treated in the way that he was, judged so harshly, whether by
Peña or others. Nor had Bolívar, cast out by the legislature, with all his
properties in Venezuela taken from him.
If Martí’s biography of Peña is little known, the fate of his October 28,
1893 address entitled “Bolívar” has been treated quite differently, appear-
ing as it has in anthologies. Visibility is one thing, engagement another,
though. For to the degree the text has been commented on, the tendency
has been to smooth over the “rough edges,” downplaying if not suppress-
ing entirely Martí’s own critical relationship to Bolívar. The reason for this
is as simple or complex as is the stark fact of geo-politics. In the twentieth
century, Latin American critics, historians, and politicians, including
Cuban, constructed their conception of the continent or hemisphere by
representing Martí and Bolívar as a complementary pair. In turn, US
actors mimicked them, presenting the two as coterminous, as Leo Rowe,
general secretary of the Pan American Union (1910–1948), did in a piece
on the two in relation to the indigenous in the mid-1930s.
 4  JOSÉ MARTÍ AND VENEZUELA: REDRESSING BOLIVARIAN DOCTRINE  109

Imagined and reimagined across US and Latin American divides, the pair
spiraled forward and have come down to us as almost identical, their doc-
trines inextricably linked to the point that concepts promoted by the one are
confused with those advocated by the other. Of this, an important example
is the patria grande (great fatherland), a term that Martí takes from Bolívar
and uses, but by which he means to designate a common cultural legacy that
belongs to all Latin Americans, not a term that refers to a large state.
In the Simón Bolívar address of October 28, 1893, Martí, ever the per-
former, is subtle, bold and brilliant. He applies the paradigm of radical self-
critique that he lays out two years earlier in “Nuestra América” (“Our
America”) to his object that is Bolívar. The critique does not come immedi-
ately. We see Martí biding his time until he arrives at the controversial final
years of Bolívar’s life, which he relates to his audience, as if communicating
an unfamiliar and perhaps unwelcome “truth” concerning a beloved and
much-admired family member, a truth he pronounces ever so meticulously
yet forcefully, weaving together, as only he could, the two extremes of praise
and critique. Martí carefully selects the subjects about which he writes, using
the act of portraiture as a space in which to carry out his political goals.
The address is all about revision and change, about redressing in the
senses of both reattiring and setting right. Bolívar, Martí insists, will always
remain a hero for Latin Americans, but the Liberator should be thought
of as having not one legacy but two, the military and the political. The first
is unblemished and heroic, a model of never-seen-before leadership. The
second, which concerned his leadership of the Gran Colombia and his
promotion of the Federation of the Andes, was stained with intrigue
and scandal.
Martí was skilled as a biographer, as we have seen above. But what in
particular explains his adeptness in this genre? He had ability to manipu-
late the rhetorical trope of the encomium, praising his subjects, but also
slyly revealing their other side, as we have just seen in his portrait of Peña.
Other examples of this range from his hagiographic treatment of the
Spanish sixteenth-century priest and historian Bartolomé de Las Casas
which culminates with commentary on his infamous “lapse” in ­judgment—
that of advocating for importing peoples of Africa to take the place of the
indigenous in the mines and in the fields, a lapse for which Las Casas him-
self asked for forgiveness—to his portrayals of the Brooklyn Bridge, with
workers in the moment of its construction dying of the bends when scal-
ing ladders from the depths of the caissons; and Coney Island, with single
mothers leaving children behind in hotel rooms to pursue their pleasure.
110  R. T. CONN

Martí’s presentation of Bolívar is hardly different, then, from that of

the subjects above, moving as it does between the poles of praise and cri-
tique. On the one hand, he describes Bolívar in the heavens in a throne-­
like chair, his boots still on because independence, Martí explains, has not
been fully realized. On the other, changing direction as he takes exception
with the image of the statesman passed down to him and his generation,
he characterizes Bolívar as having not given proper value to regional reali-
ties, caught in the grip of the top-down Enlightenment idea of federation
which prevented him from understanding that once liberation had been
achieved he needed to allow the process to return to its local roots. Martí
is referring both to the Gran Colombia and the Federation of the Andes:

Perhaps, in his dream of glory, for América and for himself, he did not see
that the unity of spirit, indispensable to the salvation and happiness of our
American peoples, suffered, more than it was helped, with his union in theo-
retical and artificial forms that did not adjust to the solid ground of reality.15

But there is a reason for this. Bolívar came from the white upper classes,
the mantuanos. Martí tell us that “not having it [the inclination or the
guts] in his own marrow, and his own particular ways and elevated racial
position (casta) not transmitting it to him, he did not have the capacity to
understand that the soul of the people is what saves republics for their only
law is the true liberty.”16
Martí is revising how we should regard Bolívar. In his narrative, laden
with the tropes of romanticism, he characterizes Bolívar as failing in the
political phase of his career (1825–1830) on account of the top-down
Enlightenment view of which we have just spoken with its origins in his
class-based sentiment. Martí provides a different vision of his long military
career. How he does so is interesting. Bolívar overcame dissent and division
among the leaders who vied with him for authority. Actors and groups are
all mentioned, but the tensions among them are downplayed, if not sup-
pressed, in order to emphasize the “common project” over which Bolívar
presided. Finessing in this way Bolívar’s complex relationship to leaders
whose intention and deeds were not always consonant with his own, at
times running at cross-purposes, Martí presents them as occupying one and
the same stage as Bolívar; the plains, valleys, and mountains of Latin America
in which their military lives transpired having the power to transcend by
sending Bolívar forth as the expression of a common will and a common
direction.
 4  JOSÉ MARTÍ AND VENEZUELA: REDRESSING BOLIVARIAN DOCTRINE  111

In Martí’s story of Bolívar and independence, there is no allusion, then,

to the rivalry of caudillo leaders, to centralists and federalists, Colombians
and Peruvians, creoles who were independentists, and creoles who were
royalists. They are all part of the same process, although that process is
one that has its roots, as Martí tells his audience, in the populist, anti-­
Spanish movements of the eighteenth century. As US historian David
Bushnell explains, nationalist accounts frequently portray these rebellions
as a prelude to independence rather than as discrete reactions to an over-
zealous Bourbon regime that sought to impose a new order on colonial
society through the intendancies and the taxes on tobacco and alcohol.17
What Martí does with the rebellions of the previous century and other
acts of popular resistance is important. For in this, his revised, ahistorical
version of Bolívar, leader of the creole, liberal revolution, he uses these
rebellions as ethical and political standards for his recreation of indepen-
dence as a mestizo, popular process. The scene is dramatic. Caracas’s 9000-
foot mountain, the Ávila, watching over Bolívar as if to signal his elevated
status as a descendant of the Caracas white elite, Bolívar sees parade before
him the mestizo corpses of figures from the eighteenth-century Comuneros
Revolt and Tupac Amaru Rebellion as well as from other colonial moments
of resistance and from the post-1810 independence process, all “mar-
tyred” by the Spanish. Led by José de Antequera, leader of the comunero
movement, the group includes men and women who fought together,
wives who witnessed the brutal torture and killing of their husbands at the
hands of the Spanish and those of the Granadan resistance of 1814–1818
seized by the Spanish counter-revolution forces and executed, in particular
the lone and valiant Policarpa Salavarrieta, whose statue today occupies
pride of place in Bogotá.18 Martí, in constructing his bottom-up vision of
independence, prominently includes in this way heroic female figures,
whether as companions or as rebels who suffered in the independence
process. Martí is clothing Bolívar in the names of the martyred, names that
he wants to live on rather than those of the patrician figures of independence.
But Martí, in reconstructing independence, does not include all figures or
communities that fall outside the creole sector. The pardo community, which
was in fact an integral force in the independence movement in Venezuela
and New Granada (1810–1825), is a case in point. Martí says nothing of it,
never mind, then, of its history from the years prior to independence through
the beginning of the new republics, or of Bolívar’s adamant stance that par-
dos be held back. Píar, the important pardo general who helped secure
Angostura and whose execution by Bolívar for insubordination has been at
112  R. T. CONN

the center of debate, as we have seen, is indicated once by his last name and
a reference to his “cabeza rizada” (“curly head”).19 Neither is there any
indication of Bolívar’s meeting with Alexandre Pétion or his turn to cham-
pion of abolition of slavery subsequent to that meeting. What an extraordi-
nary omission, we could think. But, in neither case—be it the elision of
Bolívar’s negative relationships to race (his alleged execution of Píar for racial
reasons, particularly to prevent the formation of a pardo polity), or of the
positive (the emancipation of black slaves)—should we be surprised. Martí,
liberal white creole that he was, sought, as the Cuban-American historian
Louis Pérez explains, to eliminate the critical category of non-whiteness
from the future creole-­managed Cuba he imagined in a country in which
slavery was only finally abolished by the Spanish Cortes in 1886 and in which
conservative elites had for decades warned of the possibility of another Haiti
to control a racially mixed society with continuing enslavement of blacks, but
also free blacks and mulattoes who in the 1830s and early 1840s were gain-
ing economic power and together with white abolitionists were ultimately
violently repressed.20 To speak of Píar or pardo leaders, or for that matter of
Pétion would have meant evoking the possibility of a polity for non-whites,
something Martí would not do. But is Martí, who years earlier spoke of race
with regard to Leonardo Infante, doing an about-face? Not necessarily, as we
can think that in that case as well he is suppressing the subject positions of
pardos, only telling of Infante’s relationship to white-managed state forma-
tion, his racial identity neatly contained in the trial and execution that were
so important for Venezuelan secession from the Gran Colombia.
The pardo community excluded, Martí provides us with a vision of pure
becoming, and affirmation with Latin America and Spain clearly defined as
antagonists and with the conflicts within the former subsumed by the
larger historical context he grafts onto the present. As for the rest of
Europe, France and England continue to represent the Enlightenment
culture that was Bolívar’s but now are also presented as symbolizing the
paradigm of high culture in and against which, as in so many of his writ-
ings, Latin American identity is imagined. The importance of both his
heavenly military Bolívar, still in his boots, and the parade of corpses to
which Bolívar is made to bear witness cannot be overstated. Martí is cele-
brating in a new but similar way the heroic values of war of which the
Puerto Rican intellectual Arcadio Díaz Quiñones speaks in relation to
Martí’s 1885 reflection on the then recently deceased US American Civil
War general, Ulysses S. Grant.
 4  JOSÉ MARTÍ AND VENEZUELA: REDRESSING BOLIVARIAN DOCTRINE  113

Díaz Quiñones shows how Martí positions Grant from above, in what he
calls Martí’s war from the clouds.21 But Martí, in continuing to promote those
values, the war from the clouds now symbolically represented by his war-­ready
celestial Bolívar, is not only seeking to re-define independence as a popular
moment. Through his portrayal of the different moments of independence,
which now includes the rebellions of the eighteenth century, Martí projects a
vision in which “American popular heroism” has a wide and deep foundation,
with the examples of the mestizo movements of the eighteenth century also
demonstrating that Latin America is anything but a single totality. Instead,
what he shows in graphic detail is a hemisphere broken into “its regions,”
each one aggrieved, having suffered at the hands of the Spanish and deserving
for this reason, as Cuba then was at this late date, of possessing political auton-
omy and sovereignty. The Latin American independent countries have a right
to be sovereign not because of the creole leaders of the 1810s and 1820s who
founded them as exclusionary republics but because of those who in the
struggle to defend their communities over the decades and in the struggle for
independence die at the hands of the Spanish.
Martí has reached a pinnacle of sorts in his address, arriving at a prin-
ciple that has long been sacred to him, namely that suffering is precisely
what confers the rights of nationhood. The armed-conflict that was inde-
pendence needed to be continental in scope in order to be successful, he
states without hesitation. This formulation is not dissimilar to that of the
British historian John Lynch, who speaks of the Gran Colombia as a neces-
sity of war. Once that process is completed, the territories in which resis-
tance has its roots have the ethical right to regain their sovereignty under
the new democratic conditions.
The symbolism of the fallen heroes from throughout the continent
who parade before Bolívar—figures who are distinctly not members of the
elites—could not be clearer. Their acts of sacrifice impose a moral obliga-
tion on Bolívar: to shape his politics to reflect the fact of the regional,
popular “martyrs” whose acts of resistance either preceded or coincided
with the years of independence, inasmuch as their suffering and deaths
confer upon their territories inalienable rights. As for the Cuban indepen-
dence movement over which Martí presided, there would be new martyrs,
including, of course, Martí himself, who was killed in Dos Ríos in 1895,
soon after reaching Cuba. What would become of Martí’s corpse? Could
we not imagine it also filing before the war-ready Bolívar to compel him
to see with new eyes, right behind that of Antequera and Tupac Amaru
and other fallen or executed regional heroes?
114  R. T. CONN

At the end of the address, Martí speaks of Bolívar’s expulsion, milking

for his own ends a phrase that, according to the historical record, Bolívar
uttered on his deathbed to José Palacios, a former, though still not for-
mally emancipated, slave of Bolívar’s family who was his servant and com-
panion, “José, José, vámonos, que de aquí nos echan; ¿adónde iremos?”
(“José, José, let’s get going, they are throwing us out of here; where will
we go?”)22 But the critical terms with which he is looking at Bolívar’s exile
have changed radically since 1881. In his article on the letrado Miguel
Peña, to use Ángel Rama’s term that aptly captures the diverse functions
undertaken by Peña in the world of law, writing, and politics, Martí both
underlines that the Gran Colombia was not a viable political organization
and laments Bolívar’s expulsion. Now without mincing words, he tells the
audience that Bolívar committed an error, betraying the children he helped
to bring into existence. He declares that Bolívar deserved to be expelled,
having violated the contract of governor and governed presented in “Our
America.” Bolívar and America, joined in the period of independence, are
now disjoined, he pronounces. “And so disappears the conjunction of
Bolívar and America for the project of independence, the distance between
them now greater than that of the heaven’s stars….”23 Why? Bolívar
refuses to step down, confusing his government that has collapsed with
the republic itself, which must be allowed to establish a new government.
He has imposed an idea on the people of America that is unworkable and
unrealistic, “determined to unite under one distant central government…
the countries of the revolution, born with multiple heads.…”24
What of the regional creole elites? What of the Venezuelan Domingo
Monagas (son of José Gregorio Monagas, and Nicanor Bolet Peraza’s
brother-in-law) who was one of the speakers at the 1893 birthday celebra-
tion inspired by the Venezuelan members of the society and who addressed
the matter of social cohesion? They have been removed from the story.
Martí constructs the expulsion as resulting not from Bolívar’s conflict with
local elites but from the disregard of a mantuano for popular regional
sentiment. Bolívar, the mantuano, has failed to reflect adequately on what
a political system should be in Latin America. His facile idea of a large state
imported from Enlightenment models undermines the liberal principle of
autonomous government rooted in the wider political community. There
is no mention of the Bogotá elites’ decision to demand that he leave New
Granada nor of the Venezuelan order. The elites do not expel Bolívar. In
Martí’s story, the masses do. These are the masses that the mantuano does
 4  JOSÉ MARTÍ AND VENEZUELA: REDRESSING BOLIVARIAN DOCTRINE  115

not know and with whom his education prevents him from sympathizing.
Was Martí calling for the Latin American elites to know the worlds they
live in, to understand the perspectives of others, so that they can be sensi-
tive to injustice and act accordingly, furthermore, to understand the fact
that property produces inequality? Was he pointing them to Rousseau’s
Emile?
Finally, what is the answer that Martí provides to the question he poses,
after having stripped Bolívar of many of his credentials as a political thinker
and statesman, and therefore undercutting the value of his writings as an
unmediated form of political doctrine for the present? Where will Bolívar
go? Having spoken the truth about the father of independence, having
placed at the center of the story of his life his great error, Martí tells his
readers that the place Bolívar will go to is to the hearts and minds of the
generations to come, of his children, who, also grateful for all that he
made possible, will shed a sentimental tear for the heroic father. Martí,
who has bathed himself in the glow of the Liberator’s sword, can now
embrace all of Bolívar by way of nostalgia and sentiment, in a sense, then,
righting the wrong committed by Peña by providing the expelled figure
that he himself has expelled again with a spiritual homecoming. This was
not Larrazábal’s statesman or the Gran Colombia. Nicanor Bolet Peraza
and the Monagas clan could not have been pleased.
As for Cubans, they are to remember Bolívar’s words vowing to liber-
ate their country, words that Martí supplies to them and the rest of his
audience in his report on the celebration in his weekly, Patria, on
November 4, appearing along with the address itself. Cubans know they
were never fulfilled but can feel through Martí’s words that they form part
of Latin America’s great epic. They will have no such nostalgia for the
United States which could have assisted in their war of liberation that was
the War of Ten Years, 1868–1878, but did not, as Martí states in his 1889
piece, “A Vindication of Cuba,” first written in English, then translated
into Spanish.25
Martí, concerned in this article about plans by US and Cuban actors to
annex Cuba during these years, dramatizes the fact of Cubans fighting for
themselves; and the suffering, the disappointment, and betrayal they felt
when in the throes of their struggle for independence—over 200,000 lives
were lost on both sides—the nation of Lincoln, as he puts it, does nothing.
Cubans, having fought their own battles with great honor and died—the
message Martí is sending to his English- and Spanish-speaking readers—
116  R. T. CONN

are proud, heroic, and capable. They will liberate themselves. Now, four
years later, Martí in this crucial speech about Bolívar—Bolívar’s boots still
on and his own soon to be hoisted over his feet for the first time—articu-
lates anew his political vision of a republicanism rooted in the people—
with Bolívar as the military instrument of that vision but not the guide.
Martí, in New York, both embraced the Venezuelan narrative of
Bolívar’s life and changed it. The idea of the Gran Colombia that was so
important in the Venezuelan Liberal tradition was not to be recuperated.
In fact, it was shattered. Nor was any other aspect of Bolívar the statesman
to be retained. Martí was calling for a new science of government, making
Bolívar into the example of the leader who produces a bad model of gov-
ernance and who is for that reason removed from his position by the peo-
ple. Bolívar is perhaps the first and only Latin American leader to be
evaluated by the critical standard set forth in “Our America.” Had Martí
lived past his 42 years, there would have been more. As we will see in the
next chapter, in the new twentieth century, Venezuelans will call for a sci-
ence of government rooted in the idea of a national reality. It will be a
vision quite different from that of Martí, though they will find much to
take from Martí’s “Our America” in regard to his idea of government as a
national evolution. What they will not do is invest the masses with the
ethical duty to overthrow governments that do not serve their interests.

Notes
1. José Martí, “Páez,” in Nuestra América (Barcelona: Biblioteca Ayacucho,
1985), 179 (El Porvenir, New York, 11 de junio de 1890).
2. José Martí, “La fiesta de Bolívar en la Sociedad Literaria Hispanoamericana,”
in Nuestra América (Buenos Aires: Editorial Losada, 1980), 92. “Los
Cubanos lo veremos siempre arreglando con Sucre la expedición, que no
llegó jamás, para libertar a Cuba!”
3. Felipe, Larrazábal, La vida y correspondencia general del libertador Simón
Bolívar; enriquecida con la inserción de los manifiestos, mensages, exposicio-
nes, proclamas, &. &. (New York: E.O. Jenkins, 1865).
4. “Centenario de Bolívar; informe de la Comisión nacional de Bolivia de su
participación en las fiestas que han tenido lugar en Caracas y reseña de
ellas,” La Opinión Nacional (Caracas, 1883).
5. José Martí, “La estatua de Bolívar” in Nuestra América. Ed. Pedro
Henríquez Ureña (Buenos Aires: Edición Losada, 1980), 79–82.
6. Speech of January 2, 1814. Speech Vault. Accessed Sept. 23, 2108: http://
www.speeches-usa.com/Transcripts/simon_bolivar-trustee.html.
 4  JOSÉ MARTÍ AND VENEZUELA: REDRESSING BOLIVARIAN DOCTRINE  117

7. José Martí, “El centenario de Bolívar en Nueva York” in Nuestra América.

Ed. Pedro Henríquez Ureña (Buenos Aires: Edición Losada, 1980), 77.
8. José Martí, “A Vindication of Cuba” in José Martí: Selected Writings, Ed.
and Trans. Esther Allen (New York: Penguin Books, 2002), 263–267.
9. Ibid., “Our America,” 290.
10. José Martí, “Miguel Peña” in José Martí: Nuestra América (Barcelona:
Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1985). (Revista Venezolana, Caracas, July 1, 1881).
11. Ibid., “Por entonces, ni los venezolanos gustaban de ser mandados por los
granadinos, ni estos de ver a aquéllos en su casa; ni importaba al
Vicepresidente de Colombia tanto ser teniente de un pueblo dilatado,
como capitán en pueblo propio. De Caracas se quejaba Santander, y de
Peña; y Peña, de Bogotá y Santander,” 138–139.
12. For the date on which Pedermo’s body is found and the date on which the
execution takes place, I am relying on Salvador de Madariaga, Bolívar
(Coral Gables, Florida: University of Miami Press, 1952), 524.
13. For an explanation of the episode, see Frank Safford and Marco Palacios,
Colombia: Fragmented Land, Divided Society (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2002), 117–118.
14. Bartolomé Mitre, Historia de San Martín y de la emancipación sudameri-
cana, Tomo I (Buenos Aires: Editorial Universitaria de Bueno Aires, 1968),
80.
15. José Martí, “Bólivar” in Nuestra América, Ed. Pedro Henríquez Ureña
(Buenos Aires: Edición Losada, 1980), 89. “Acaso en sueño de gloria, para
la América y para sí, no vio que la unidad de espíritu, indispensable a la
salvación y dicha de nuestros pueblos americanos, padecía, más que se
ayudaba, con su unión en formas teóricas y artificiales que no se acomoda-
ban sobre el seguro de la realidad.”
16. Ibid., 89. “… no pudo, por no tenerla en el redaño, ni venirle del hábito ni
de la casta, conocer la fuerza moderada del alma popular, de la pelea de
todos en abiera lid, que salva, sin más ley que la libertad verdera, a las
repúblicas.”
17. See: David Bushnell, The Making of Modern Colombia, A Nation In Spite
of Itself (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 31, 32.
18. See the multiple references to Policarpa in Felipe Larrazábal, La vida y cor-
respondencia general del libertador Simón Bolívar; enriquecida con la inser-
ción de los manifiestos, mensages, exposiciones, proclamas, &. &. (New York:
E.O. Jenkins, 1865), 499.
19. Ibid., 88.
20. See Louis Perez’s well-known reflections on the limits of the possibility of
representing blackness in national discourse in the 1890s, presented in On
Becoming Cuban: Identity, Nationality, and Culture (Chapel Hill: The
University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 91.
118  R. T. CONN

21. See Chapter 3, “José Martí (1853–1895): la guerra desde las nubes,” in
Arcadio Díaz Quiñones, Sobre los principios: los intelectuales caribeños y la
tradición (Buenos Aires: Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, 2006),
255–287.
22. José Martí, “Bólivar” in Nuestra América, Ed. Pedro Henríquez Ureña
(Buenos Aires: Edición Losada, 1980), 89–90.
23. Ibid., 89. “Y desaparece la conjunción, más larga que la de los astros del
cielo, de América y Bolívar para la obra de la independencia…”
24. Ibid., 89. “…empeñado en unir bajo un gobierno central y distantes los
países de la revolución americana, nacida con múltiples cabezas…”
25. José Martí, “Vindicación de Cuba” in José Martí: Selected Writings, Ed.
and Trans. Esther Allen (New York: Penguin Books, 2002), 263–267.
 CHAPTER 5

From Liberalism to Positivism: Gil Fortoul

and Vallenilla Lanz

The cultural and political leaders who emerged in the first decades of
Venezuela’s twentieth century conceived of their projects both within and
against the logic of textual custodianship and possession established in the
nineteenth century by Felipe Larrazábal, the O’Learys (father and son),
and the state. Aspiring to direct the political course of Venezuela, these
individuals came to view themselves in relationship to Bolívar and to his
writings, and understood the labor before them as one of bringing Bolívar
and other protagonists of independence forth to steer intellectual and
political discourse. They performed this function in the context of
Venezuela, particularly as this regarded the country’s history of civil war,
military insurrections, and dictatorship, as well as in the context of Latin
America, the United States, and Europe, where interest in independence
and Bolívar surged subsequent to the Spanish-Cuban-American war of 1898.
They were José Gil Fortoul, an historian, diplomat, senator, and one
of several presidents who served Juan Vicente Gómez during his dicta-
torship (1908–1935), guaranteeing the appearance of constitutionality
of his regime; Laureano Vallenilla Lanz, the figure most identified with
the Gómez administration for his work as editor of the regime’s official
newspaper, his 1919 Cesarismo democrático (Democratic Caesarism), a
text that endeavors to justify dictatorship, even using toward this end
Martí’s counsel to the political elites of the Americas in “Our America”
that they produce governmental models that are original and useful,
and for his role as president of the Congress for 20  years during the

© The Author(s) 2020 119

R. T. Conn, Bolívar’s Afterlife in the Americas,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26218-1_5
120  R. T. CONN

Gómez period; Vicente Lecuna, an engineer by training who went on to

become president of the Venezuelan National Bank (1915–1954),
director of the Archivo del Libertador, founder of the Bolivarian Society
of Venezuela in 1937, and an historian of Bolívar’s battles and military
strategies; and Rufino Blanco Fombona, a fiction writer, historian, and
essayist. The first two were actors in the Gómez regime, performing a
variety of roles in or for his administration, and constituting the nucleus
of the distinguished group of learned figures who surrounded the
leader. Lecuna was connected to Gómez’s regime, but he held no gov-
ernmental position. In contrast, Blanco Fombona, whom we discussed
in the first chapter in reference to Ángel Rama, was the regime’s most
well-­known critic, a figure who throughout his career spoke freely
against despotic power in Venezuela; he was jailed in 1910, and subse-
quently exiled. For all four, Bolívar’s writings were, on the one hand, a
source from which they could draw to produce their narratives, and, on
the other hand, a body of material that could authorize the particular
fields of knowledge they sought to institute.
For Gil Fortoul and Vallenilla Lanz, the field in question was history,
which they arrived at through their engagement with the figures of the
conservative European movement known as positivism, and through the
academic disciplines that sat at the pinnacle of this European movement—
sociology, criminology, and race theory. From Auguste Comte (French) to
Hippolyte Taine (French) and Ernest Renan (French), and from Cesare
Lombroso (Italian) and Gabriel Tarde (French) to Gustave Le Bon
(French) and Herbert Spencer (English), the scholars of this mostly French
movement took from the leading spaces of knowledge, the empirical sci-
ences and mathematics, to build systems based on cause and effect in order
to explain the working of society, of the human mind, of language, as well
as of literature and history. This included the idea of the environment or
milieu as having a powerful effect on the individual.
The European Revolutions of 1848 and the French Commune of 1871
were critical moments for many of them. The 1848 revolt, France’s first
experience of upheaval since the 1830 July Revolution that replaced the
House of Bourbon with the House of Orléans, saw liberals and socialists
revive the republican tradition of the French Revolution: liberté, égalité,
fraternité. Elections were finally agreed upon, with the nephew of Napoleon
Bonaparte, Charles-Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, becoming president. This
was France’s Second Republic. In a coup d’etat in 1851, Charles-Louis
declared the Second Empire. He was now Bonaparte III. The other
 5  FROM LIBERALISM TO POSITIVISM: GIL FORTOUL AND VALLENILLA LANZ  121

moment, 1871, had the dimension of a civil war and similarly saw the
revival of the republicanism of the French Revolution by liberals and social-
ists. The context was the French-Prussian war. It had come to an end after
the capture of Bonaparte III, the immediate termination of his Second
Empire as a result of his capture, the subsequent declaration of the Third
Republic, and with the French government still not submitting to Bismark,
the siege of Paris by Prussian forces that resulted in Parisians starving. A
treaty was signed, ending this short war. The German Empire was born.
But in France a battle ensued between the French Left and French monar-
chists, with 10,000 Parisians (national guardsmen and others under the
direction of the Commune) killed by the French army.
Of particular importance are the responses of Renan and Taine, the one
to the events of 1848 and the other to those of both 1871 and 1848. Both
turned to history through the lens of sociology to intervene in the political
discussion. Renan produced The Future of Science: Ideas of 1848 in 1849,
though not publishing the work until 1890 after taking from it throughout
his career for individual publications. For his part, Taine wrote The Origins
of Contemporary France (1875–1893), doing so in multiple volumes over
some 20 years. Creating conservative historical visions, they purported to
move beyond politics by revealing unseen social forces at work, forces that
showed France’s eighteenth-century philosophers who helped produce the
conditions for the French Revolution were themselves prejudiced, overly
immersed in their own republican visions and unable to see the larger his-
torical continuities and specific realities that defined France. Republicanism,
which they constructed around the dual dates of 1789 and 1848 and 1789
and 1871, respectively, was either a historical stage or a deviation in what
was a larger story of social and institutional evolution and change.
For Taine, the French Revolution resulted from the privileged social
classes abandoning their representative positions in society. The old feudal
lords became part of the decadent centralizing machinery of Louis XV and
Louis XVI, with the result that the natural attitude of deference on the part
of the peasant classes toward the purported superior classes disappeared. A
social fabric that had taken 800 years to develop was split apart by the
court, with the entirety of France, as Taine dramatizes, transformed into
one massive drawing room. The neglect of the state and of the upper
classes, in short, the breakdown of a moral system based on patronage that
had been the foundation of the society: here were the causes of the revolu-
tion, not the world of ideas.
122  R. T. CONN

Sociology provided the key for Taine, just as it did for Renan, who says
following Comte:

The science which will govern the world will not be politics. Politics, that is,
the way to govern humanity like a machine, will vanish as a special art as
soon as society shall cease to be a machine. The master science, the then
sovereign, will be philosophy, that is to say, the science which will investigate
the aim and conditions of society. “In politics,” says Herder, “man is a
means, in morality he is an end.” The revolution of the future will be the
triumph of morality over politics.1

Comte, who died in 1857, supported Louis Napoleon’s coup d’état in

1851; he then turned away from him to celebrate Czar Nicholas I. Comte
undertook to fuse different forms of knowledge in a teleological manner,
conceiving of history as moving from a theological stage to a metaphysical
one and finally to one based in the natural sciences. Society would be
improved by scientific knowledge; it would make politics unnecessary. For
Comte, Renan, and Taine, the new political order was to consist of
scholarly elites educating the masses rather than political parties competing
for the vote of citizens, who were seen as uninformed.
In Latin America, in what was a key moment in state formation, not
only Venezuela but virtually all the countries in the region having been
sites of civil wars and political instability, intellectuals in the final two
decades of the nineteenth century undertook the creation of their own
positivist visions in dialogue with these figures, desirous of supporting
their political leaders in state formation while perceiving themselves as
intellectual vanguards. Of the philosophers and academics embraced, the
most well known is the Frenchman Auguste Comte, central to national
projects in Mexico and Brazil and whose words celebrating order and
progress ­without reference to liberty becoming the mantra for the hemi-
sphere. In Mexico, Comte served as the basis for a formal national educa-
tional project, as symbolized by the establishment of the National
Preparatory School, a training ground for Mexico’s new technocrats of
knowledge. Some came to be advisors to Porfirio Díaz in the fields of
finance, jurisprudence, industry, and education during his long authoritar-
ian rule (1876–1911). The most powerful was Finance Minister José Yves
Limantour who had been born into the Mexican oligarchy. In Brazil,
Comte inspired the new secular religion that was the nation, with actors
from the military using Comte’s figure to declare the republic in 1889 as
they broke with Brazil’s constitutional monarchy, and with figures like
 5  FROM LIBERALISM TO POSITIVISM: GIL FORTOUL AND VALLENILLA LANZ  123

Cândido Rondon carrying, as Todd A. Diacon has demonstrated, the spir-

itual banner of Comte’s vision forward in the decades ahead with his
extension of the telegraph through the Amazon and his defense of Brazilian
indigenous tribes.
In Venezuela, where centralization of the state came later than it did in
Mexico and Brazil, or in stages if we also include the period of Guzmán
Blanco, as scholars do, positivism did little to improve the material condi-
tions of the country. The scientific and technical institutions and schools
as well as the public buildings and public works that were produced in
Mexico, and that had begun to be produced by Guzmán Blanco, did not
materialize in Venezuela. Nor did a liberal republican tradition of the kind
in Brazil arise. As for the international oil industry over which Juan Vicente
Gómez presided from the late 1910s forward, this was a private affair. The
money from the concessions awarded to Schell and Standard Oil went to
Gómez and his cronies.
If in Venezuela positivism ended up having few material effects on the
country, its function was still profound, even more profound than else-
where depending on the measure. It created a new political culture as
shaped by the context in which Venezuela found itself in the wake of its
civil war of 1901–1903. In that war, the Revolución Libertadora
(Liberating Revolution), which pitted the federalist model against the
centralist and that resulted in the death of tens of thousands of people,
Manuel Antonio Matos and other regional caudillos raised large militias in
an attempt at holding on to their financial and commercial prerogatives,
prerogatives that had been the basis of the state financial system and that
were being challenged by the new head of state, Cipriano Castro, who had
marched successfully on Caracas in 1899.
In two years’ time, Castro and his minister of war, Juan Vicente Gómez,
prevailed, breaking the financial system Matos had presided over, with
Matos himself being forced into exile. Throwing their hat in with Castro
and later with his military lieutenant who unseated him—Juan Vicente
Gómez—Gil Fortoul and Vallenilla Lanz offered their services, deploying
positivist ideas to legitimize a unified as opposed to a federal state, to rede-
fine the role of the intellectual from party or caudillo affiliate to public
administrator and scholar, to place limits on constitutionalism, and to
close down the possibility for political action by producing narratives rep-
resenting the country’s Conservative and Liberal parties as belonging to
the past, Venezuela having arrived at the purported truth that what was
needed was strong executive authority. For these figures, periodization
would now be the rule: histories that told the story of Venezuela across time.
124  R. T. CONN

The horror that was race theory was a central component of positiv-
ism’s vision of modernization, with whites presented as standing as civiliz-
ers over less civilized races. But unlike earlier figures in countries such as
Mexico and Argentina, including the historian Bartolomé Mitre who used
race to justify the marginalization and “erasure” of indigenous peoples
and their traditions to clear the way for modernity, Gil Fortoul and
Vallenilla Lanz deployed the category progressively, just as their counter-
parts in Brazil did. In particular, in what was an important move in their
goal of redefining the terms of discourse in the public sphere from one of
politics to one of knowledge in the service of economic (and infrastruc-
ture) progress and the state, they placed the Venezuelan white elite against
other racial groups, defending indigenous and Afro-descended Venezuelans
as subjects to be affirmed as equal citizens. This was a new citizen-making
project that blended authoritarianism with progressiveness, with history
being the place in which Venezuelans could see themselves reflected, mov-
ing forward in time, and furthermore, with the social class that had run
the towns and regions of Venezuela, put into a new framework, radically
reducing its moral authority by virtue of its connections to slavery.
The idea of the old political nation was to be no more. The task of the
intellectual was to produce forms that meet the needs of society as defined
by the interpreter. Gil Fortoul and Vallenilla Lanz drew from the positivist
notions that the nation state is an organism with its own social laws; that it
has an evolution that must be understood as such; that there is a material
reality underlying that of ideas knowable through cause and effect; and that
order and progress are the most important values. The binary o ­ pposition
that supported all this was defined by that which is real and true, on the one
hand, and that which is imaginary, fictional, and untrue on the other. This
was the discourse of realism. Source work provided the foundation for their
assertions. Troubling though their attack on politics was at the level of the
new conservative political order they sought to legitimize in their desire to
open the way for development, Venezuelan positivism is the foundation of
the country’s intellectual and cultural tradition, the categories it produced
defining the terms for political discussion in the country for the rest of the
century while making their way across the Americas.
José Gil Fortoul had long been drawing from the field of sociology. In
the 1880s and 1890s, from the sites of his diplomatic missions in France,
Switzerland, and Great Britain, he produced sociological essays in which
he reflects on Venezuela’s elites and the country’s constitutions, as well as
a treatise on criminology in which he argues that best practices would
 5  FROM LIBERALISM TO POSITIVISM: GIL FORTOUL AND VALLENILLA LANZ  125

result from Venezuela’s federal states adopting and trying their own codes
and comparing experiences. Now, as he went on to write a history of
Venezuela from the site of his new diplomatic mission, Berlin, Germany,
he had much to consider, including several important histories written
earlier in the nineteenth century. He would make use of a vast range of
materials and include an impressive array of historical characters, all con-
nected to one another as if in a novel. Bolívar would be one historical
character, one hero, but he would stand out. How would he portray him?
Before Gil Fortoul was a Bolivarian legacy that included works that were
critical of Bolívar, if not denunciatory, particularly outside Venezuela, and
the majority within Venezuela that were celebratory. The two tomes of
Felipe Larrazábal that sought to give Venezuela a new footing on the
world stage in the wake of the Guerra Federal of 1859–1863 were among
the most important. Through classicism and the specifically nineteenth-­
century discourse of culture and civilization, Larrazábal, as we saw in
Chap. 3, presents Bolívar as standing for the ideals of abolition, constitu-
tional liberalism, executive leadership, and self-cultivation.
Gil Fortoul with his two-volume 1907–1909 Historia constitucional de
Venezuela (Constitutional History of Venezuela) that was hailed at the time
by the US scholar and explorer Hiram Bingham as an impartial history of
the Venezuelan state—a model, just as Gil Fortoul would have hoped, for
the kind of history that should be produced across Latin America, free
of the politics that gripped intellectual production—constructs Bolívar
not as the promise of a Venezuela with a strong, liberal, and wise execu-
tive, but rather as the linchpin in the linear political and ­socioeconomic
history he tells of his country, one going from the colonial period to inde-
pendence and the Gran Colombia, and from the Gran Colombia to the
republic with race and social class major categories of analysis.2 But, posi-
tivist that he was, he offers not only a history of an evolving democratic
nation, appropriating the word “democratic” for his story, just as Vallenilla
Lanz would, but also new critical knowledge to guide and educate
Venezuelans, an outline of sorts of what the human sciences can be.
Through the record of real time he claims to produce, Venezuelans will
learn how to view certain historical figures, moments, and issues.
That critical knowledge was based on an analysis of all the major factors
that define the social organism: individuals, social classes, congresses, con-
stitutions, public opinion, political parties, insurrections, and so on. Gil
Fortoul drew from the principle of historical investigation defined by the
founder of the modern practice of history, German historian Leopold von
126  R. T. CONN

Ranke, a principle that had been embraced by many, including one of his
models, Taine, who made use of the diaries of the French upper class.
Ranke called for historians to examine particular time periods in a nation’s
history by seeking out primary sources rather than regarding those time
periods simply as chapters in, let us say, a centuries-long story. Gil Fortoul
lists only a few of the myriad sources he consults—a fact lamented by
Bingham who hopes that in a future edition he will provide a full account
of them—but Gil Fortoul gives full weight to the periods of time he stud-
ies, concerned to bring them forth according to their own conditions.
With regard to the colonial period, he details the monstrosity of the slave
trade and its organic links to the creole class and the Basque-owned Royal
Guipuzcoan Company of Venezuela (1728–1785) that managed colonial
commerce for the crown. In his account of the new period that is the
republic, he is also concerned to use the Rankian method of primary
source work. In his analysis of the interaction between social classes, gov-
ernment, and infrastructure projects, he shows when progress and order
are successful and when they are not, and which factors are to be consid-
ered. Insurrections, for instance, create not only instability, but also have
a financial cost for the economy, an effect not always considered by the
public he is educating. Of the 17 years of the conservative oligarchy there
are really only 13 to consider, he explains, since a total of four of those
years were taken up by armed conflict. Also to be tallied are the effects of
those insurrections on the treasury, which had to supply millions to rees-
tablish order.3 Congresses also can be obstacles to development when
their individual members stand in the way of needed infrastructure projects.
With regard to Venezuela’s constitutions, which will be his central con-
cern, he formulates a new vision of how to measure their value and impor-
tance. Instead of seeing them as standing alone in a tradition of reflection
coming down from Montesquieu, he presents them according to the cri-
terion of their social effectiveness: do they reflect the needs and realities of
the social order in place? He does not see them in accordance with the
ideas of the Enlightenment from which they emerged, namely that a con-
stitution must protect the citizenry from tyranny or, more radically, as
stated in the Declaration of the Rights of Man, that where the citizenry is
not protected there is no constitution.
To construct his history of Venezuela that engages with the social, eco-
nomic, and political realities of the Venezuelan nineteenth century, Gil
Fortoul provides details of constitutional reform by the government and
the elites together with information about the resurrection of the figure of
Bolívar at the hands of Páez and others in the 1830s and 1840s. He starts
 5  FROM LIBERALISM TO POSITIVISM: GIL FORTOUL AND VALLENILLA LANZ  127

by assigning Venezuela’s 1811 constitution a new place. On the one hand,

he celebrates it as Venezuela’s first constitution, modeled on the US
Constitution and France’s Declaration of the Rights of Man, but on the
other he presents it, in accordance with his desire to speak across
Venezuela’s periods, as having its true ideological basis in the colonial
social reality. Bolívar, whom Gil Fortoul celebrates not only as a military
leader, but also as a political thinker and as an intellectual—his role as
constitution writer elevated—is an authority. But Gil Fortoul performs his
own analysis of the document, placing it in the context of the realities of
the Venezuela of the time. It reflects, he tells us, not only the new federal-
ist ideas that Bolívar dismissed for their impracticality in the 1812
Cartagena Manifesto and that he had been criticizing from his perch in
Caracas’s Sociedad Patriótica (Patriotic Society), but also class interest,
which in colonial times were regionally based. To show this, he goes
beyond the authors of the constitution to speak of the elites who pushed
the document through as signatories, individuals whom he names. But
forget the idea of holding the constitution responsible for the fall of the
republic, a position that Bolívar takes. We are told that the constitution
had no effect on the society of the times—the masses not made aware of it
and individual cities enjoying autonomy as they always had from colonial
times. He also compares the constitution to the later iterations of it, which
are the 1830 and 1857 constitutions. The first, we are informed, enables
the rise of the Venezuelan republic, the second pulls it down.
The story Gil Fortoul fashions about constitutions and the economics
of social class is also one about the individual, which he frames according
to a variation on Thomas Carlyle’s great man theory. Bolívar is at the cen-
ter of it, the figure who drove the military and political process forward
before the founding of the 1830 republic and who can be viewed as a force
unto himself, standing above the other actors who competed with him.
Gil Fortoul constructs that history as one that is Hegelian, in the sense
that each period has actors who rise to the status of being historical and
ones who do not—the former invested with the legality that characterizes
that defined role, the latter marred by their own illegality. Each situation
is different.
Bolívar is an historical actor. At first he must contend with a people
that are not ready for independence, but he brilliantly lends a sense of
legality to his 1813–1814 dictatorship, or what is called the Second
Republic, through the eloquence of his oratory, and then fully shows
who he is as a leader in 1817 when he establishes the Third Republic.
128  R. T. CONN

Bolívar made mistakes. The decision to declare the War to the Death was
incorrect, Gil Fortoul reports, but Bolívar was the only leader of the
times who possessed not only great military ability, but also political
prowess, unlike leaders such as Santiago Mariño or Manuel Píar.4 On the
subject of his decision to execute Píar (October 16, 1817), he states that
Píar had undertaken to be a leader among the creole oligarchy and that
if he had the project of leading mestizos and pardos in Guayana against
whites, that only existed in his imagination, his true interest being to
seize leadership from Bolívar. Gil Fortoul performs an analysis of Píar’s
racial qualifications for that leadership role as well, speaking of the uncer-
tainty of his lineage, some saying that he was the illegitimate son of a
European prince and a lady of the Caracas elite and that a mulatto
woman raised him. Providing more information, he includes a physical
description of him made by his prison guard that gives no indication of
his being pardo, which Gil Fortoul in contrast to John Lynch is defining
as not including lower-class white: “normal height, blue eyes, beardless,
somewhat pinkish complexion.”5 Further, he states as evidence that he
never actually intended to organize the pardo community the fact that he
gave up his own mixed-race soldiers to another commander. Píar, whom
he further describes as impulsive and aggressive, was one more actor
vying for power within the oligarchy. This was the reason he led a revolt
against Bolívar’s leadership.6
Gil Fortoul is seeking to put to an end the view of Píar as the represen-
tative of the pardo community. With this, he is also seeking to reduce the
protagonism of that community in the period of independence. Bolívar
does not hold back pardos; he does not stand against pardocracia, the
word he invented. Case closed. Gil Fortoul does the opposite with regard
to the white oligarchy. He tells the reader of the opinion of the US special
commissioner, Alejandro Scott, who wrote at the time of the First Republic
that the population of “gente de color” (pardos), made up of a mix of
whites, Indians, and blacks, is superior to creoles in courage and corporal
courage and that they are destined to lead the country.7 Gil Fortoul does
not dispute Scott’s characterization of the importance of the pardo com-
munity. He states that pardos will be the clear majority after independence.
But he takes the opportunity to affirm the leadership role of creoles for
independence. In fact, he refers to them using a racial term. He writes,
“The white creoles, authors of the revolution, were its first victims.”8 He
goes on to list the names of creoles who, as he puts it, sacrificed for the
cause of the war, identifying individuals, families, sisters. Gil Fortoul is
 5  FROM LIBERALISM TO POSITIVISM: GIL FORTOUL AND VALLENILLA LANZ  129

building a history that is based not on race conflict but the purportedly
natural progression in which races assume their positions in society and in
history. Bolívar is the natural representative of white creoles.
But if Bolívar is a great man, this does not mean that he does not have
faults or that he always prevails. He has successes and failures, is both
democratic and autocratic, and is alternately egotistical and generous. The
hard-hitting realist Gil Fortoul who is using his rigorous source work to
transform history into positivist facts does not tolerate what he calls ideal-
izations of the past. Larrazábal tells of the Gran Colombia that could have
lived on. Gil Fortoul, always positing specific causes, speaks of its imprac-
ticality in the end, of its decomposition, and of Bolívar’s physical decline;
he dies of tuberculosis, not of a broken heart. He also speaks of Bolívar’s
federation, referred to as his Andean Confederation: Bolívar fails to realize
it and also fails to become the arbiter of an international order.
Psychologically, he thought in terms of all or nothing, and at the end of
his life this psychological fact caught up with him. He could not negotiate.
Bolívar was hardly perfect, as we can see, nothing like the figure the state
had constructed and that Venezuelans admired so, and nothing like the
symbol of perennial liberation.
As for Miranda, Gil Fortoul argues that this figure celebrated by many
as one of the major intellectual forces behind independence in Latin
America never becomes an historical actor. On the one hand, this is not his
fault; the people are simply not ready for independence. But, on the other,
it is. Miranda lacked political sense—not able to read on-the-ground
­realities, blinded by his fanciful imaginings. He also lacked courage. His
decision not to attempt to take back the Puerto Cabello fort in 1812, after
Bolívar lost it, is a demonstration of cowardice that has fateful conse-
quences. His cowardice in this instance is opposed to the arrogant temer-
ity Bolívar demonstrates in the face of Boves’s forces a year and a half
later.9 In short, Miranda is made to stand for positivism’s negative values.
It is true, Gil Fortoul goes on, that Miranda is appointed dictator of the
First Republic, but not even the possession of such authority is sufficient
when the conditions are not right and his own leadership abilities flawed.
Bolívar alone is the great man of independence, the one with extraordi-
nary talents as both a military leader and a political figure.
As for Páez, Gil Fortoul tells us that he too is an historical actor.
However, this is not Páez the military leader, or the one who leads the
secession movement from the Gran Colombia. Rather, this is the figure
who holds political power in the republic because he has understood that
130  R. T. CONN

the proper course to follow after the dissolution of the Gran Colombia—
which he helped to bring about—is to ally himself with the oligarchy, the
most educated of all the social classes, as we are told. As far as Páez’s politi-
cal talents go, though, Gil Fortoul is certain to distinguish them from
Bolívar’s. Páez’s direction of the sociopolitical order was different from
Bolívar’s.
The other nineteenth-century figure who is key to Gil Fortoul’s recon-
figuration of the time period is José Tadeo Monagas, who is often seen in
tandem with his brother, José Gregorio Monagas, the two standing plainly
and simply for the values of liberalism, as they are made to by Larrazábal.
Gil Fortoul drives a wedge in that pairing. Speaking of the fact that José
Gregorio ultimately clashed with José Tadeo after his brother’s multiple
moves to remain in the presidency, breaking their agreement on alternat-
ing, Gil Fortoul reminds us that José Gregorio opposed not only his
brother’s initiative to reconstitute the Gran Colombia as a confederation
(in opposition to a centralized state) but also, then, his new constitution.
Gil Fortoul shatters the unity of the Monagas dynasty—still an important
discursive site in Venezuelan politics—while driving a wedge in the politi-
cal categories of Liberal and Conservative. According to the new moral
standard he is seeking to institute, there is nothing liberal about the Liberal
José Tadeo; in fact he was conservative when judged by his autocratic
tendencies.
Breaking the political labels down in this way to question their utility as
categories—the barometer of individual character trumping ideology—is
not all Gil Fortoul does. He also produces a new period category of
Venezuelan history which he bases on the constitutions of 1830 and 1857,
the latter which removed the anti-reelection clause for the office of the
president of the 1830 constitution. With that act, José Tadeo, we are told,
betrays the republican political tradition, sending the country into a series
of military uprisings that cannot be defended against—one revolution
occurring after another with no leader able to hold on to power, whether
it was Julián Castro, who rose up against Monagas, Carlos Soublette, or
Páez. Rather than judging the constitutions of 1830 and 1857 against
their political content, he speaks of them in terms of their effectiveness in
managing a sociopolitical reality that since the 1830s had seen uprisings
against the established government, including both Monagas and Páez
who failed in their attempts at toppling the government at different
moments. The constitution of 1830 resisted them all, we are told; that of
1857 and the one that followed in 1858—both of which Monagas had
 5  FROM LIBERALISM TO POSITIVISM: GIL FORTOUL AND VALLENILLA LANZ  131

approved without adequate participation of both political parties—resisted

none. Counting forward from 1830, all the revolutions had failed: that of
Monagas in 1831; that of Gabante in 1834; that of the Reforms in 1835;
that of Farían in 1837; that of the Gusmancist Liberals in 1846; that of
Páez in 1848 and 1849; those of Conservatives and Liberals in 1853 and
1854 were easily defeated by the constitutional government. In the six
years that follow the usurpation plan of 1857, the opposite happens: the
March revolution triumphs over Monagas; the battalion of Casas defeats
Castro in 1859; the Praetorians of Echuzuría depose Pedro Gual Escandón
and proclaim the dictatorship of 1861; the Federation finally defeats the
dictatorial government of Páez in 1863; and other revolutions will con-
tinue to triumph. There can be no doubt that when the 1830 constitution
was torn apart, there was a profound moral shock that disoriented the
oligarchy to the point of its disappearance, and opened the way for
Venezuelan democracy to fluctuate for many years between anarchic
tumult and despotic order.10
To advance his argument about social order and politics and to make
José Tadeo Monagas into his antihero, Gil Fortoul compares Monagas to
Charles-Louis Napoleon Bonaparte III (Napoleon III) in a reading that
could have been inspired by Karl Marx’s 1852 Eighteenth Brumaire. Both
leaders, we are told, betray the republican tradition through which they
are elected when they act against their constitutions. Napoleon’s nephew
refuses to accept that he cannot be reelected, so he declares the Second
Empire. Likewise, José Tadeo Monagas—who during the 1850s had been
searching for ways to get around the 1830 constitution, even putting in
motion, as we have mentioned several times, a state initiative to reconsti-
tute the Gran Colombia, with Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador to have
their own constitutions in what he conceived not as a union but as a con-
federation—engineers the passing of a new constitution that allows for
reelection. In what Gil Fortoul calls Latin Europe, civil society is strong
enough to survive a political departure from republicanism, as seen in the
French who continue their traditions in spite of the Second Empire. In
contrast, in Latin America, as exhibited by the fact of the violence and
depravity unleashed in Venezuela by virtue of Monagas’s act, it is not.11
Barbarism as the opposite of civilization—the binary that authorized so
many political projects in the nineteenth century—is now ever so close to
the surface. A prime example is Páez, who, we are told, had educated him-
self through his association with the oligarchy but who now “regresses” to
his so-called barbaric or uneducated self when he takes revenge on two
132  R. T. CONN

incarcerated federalist generals for acts of depravity committed by others

against Conservatives.12 A civilized order produced by a social class that is
no longer hegemonic has disappeared as illustrated by this act of Páez,
who evidently was a student only of the wealthy of his country—the elites
of New York City whose company he enjoyed during his two exiles, the
first time before the Federal War, and the second time after, having had no
effect on him.
A scholar of the Atlantic avant la lettre, Gil Fortoul, with these vol-
umes, which, as suggested by Bingham could have been influenced by his
long residence in Germany, was responding not only to events in his own
country, but also to the sudden transformations in the Americas of the
moment. In a mere few years everything had changed in the nations of the
Caribbean, Central America, and northern South America. There was the
Cuban-Spanish-American War of 1898 that Martí started in 1895 and that
the United States entered three years later; it seized Cuba, Puerto Rico,
and the Philippines from Spain, the first two territories which, Gil Fortoul
tells us, Bolívar had been poised to free in 1826. There was the Colombian
War of a Thousand Days (1899–1902) that tore the country apart with
some 100,000 deaths. There was the 1901–1903 Revolución Libertadora
that saw Castro and Gómez consolidate a new vision of the Venezuelan
state with modern military weapons against Matos’s alliance of regional
caudillos and with tens of thousands killed. There was the 1902 US mili-
tary intervention in Panama to bolster local elites as they took advantage
of the moment to become an independent state, the territory having been
a province of Colombia since 1821, with Wall Street plans to build the
Panama Canal propelling all this. There was the 1902–1903 international
blockade of Venezuela by the United Kingdom, Germany, and Italy to
affirm European commercial authority in the region, with the powers in
question calling loans made over several decades by so-called German and
British citizen creditors to Venezuela, loans that Castro had used to sup-
port Liberals in Colombia’s civil war, and most significantly, to fight
Manuel Antonio Matos who had major holdings in the New York &
Bermúdez Company; the German entity that built Gran Ferrocarril de
Venezuela; and the French company, de Cable Interoceánico.13 And,
finally, capping all this off was the Roosevelt Corollary of 1904.
Nothing speaks more eloquently to this context than Gil Fortoul’s
comments on Bolívar’s sparsely attended 1826 Panama Congress. How he
reconstructs the congress is important, as he does so in explicitly military
terms, speaking of the possibilities that would exist had there not been
 5  FROM LIBERALISM TO POSITIVISM: GIL FORTOUL AND VALLENILLA LANZ  133

conflict in and among the Hispanic American countries, and had treaties
been signed. What would have materialized in his utilitarian vision is noth-
ing less than “an army of 60,000 infantrymen and cavalrymen, and a fleet
of twenty-eight ships, with the goal of defending against Spain,” with
those forces prepared to cross the sea to march on Spain should it not
accept peace.14
Gil Fortoul does not say anything about the Bourbon military occupa-
tion of Spain from 1823 to 1828, but had the diplomatic military union
Bolívar sought to achieve been successful, including a liberated Cuba and
Puerto Rico, the military and political circumstances in which Hispanic
America found itself at the beginning of the twentieth century would have
been different from what they were. The “Spanish Americas” would not
be subordinate to the hegemony of the “English Americas.”15
Gil Fortoul was sending a clear message, namely that Latin Americans
must understand their position in the world so that they can ward off
threats from the “outside.” With regard to Venezuela, the subtext was the
new threat of the Roosevelt Corollary, which was a direct response to the
European blockade of Venezuelan ports. The corollary was the doctrine of
a new US economic imperialism stating that the United States could take
over the debt of Latin American countries when European countries were
creditors and threatened them, and that it reserved the right to invade
purportedly less civilized countries. Bolívar possessed immense political
knowledge of the international world, but that knowledge has been lost.
No institutional structure existed in which to hold and transmit it.
Venezuelans needed to defend themselves on the international stage.
Gil Fortoul is building a critical apparatus to transmit that knowledge
to the present, breaking down Bolívar’s acts and writings while distribut-
ing them among the disciplines he names such as to define them not as a
single entity but as distinct objects of knowledge, actionable only within
the series to which they are made to belong. Literary history is one such
field, conceived to contain figures like Felipe Larrazábal whose republican
Bolívar similar to Solon, Cincinnatus, and Washington he hoped to divest
of political relevance. Gil Fortoul locates him under this rubric to reduce
his authority, the literary signifying for positivists the unreal, fiction.16 At
the same time, true to his commitment to truth, he indicates Larrazábal’s
important role in correcting Bolívar’s much-attacked record. Oratory,
public speaking, is another field invented for the Venezuelan context by
Gil Fortoul, and to it he assigns many of Bolívar’s writings including
his “explosive” Jamaica Letter. This letter in which Bolívar speaks of
134  R. T. CONN

breaking with the present, that is, with the Spanish colonial system, to
establish a new future, had become a rhetorical wellspring for Venezuela’s
nineteenth-century tradition of military pronouncements with its unend-
ing liberational discourse. Gil Fortoul celebrates Bolívar for his writing
style, saying that it surpasses that of all his contemporaries in its efficacy
and splendor. Bolívar’s writings, he wants his readers to see, do not rep-
resent an absolute truth but are rhetorical vehicles for persuading the
public of certain ideas in the moment.
Latin American and Venezuelan constitutional thought or political sci-
ence is still another discipline he creates. In it he places Bolívar’s Bolivian
Constitution, disconnecting it from the specific project of state formation
that it defined. There is also the area of international treaties and accords,
where he lodges the event about which we have just spoken, Bolívar’s
Panama Congress of 1826. Latin American nations, he underlines, still
need to establish a form of organization to protect their interests in the
face of the United States.17
The Gran Colombia is of particular interest with regard to both the
history Gil Fortoul is constructing and his project to transform the Bolívar
legacy into material to serve as a foundation for his moral and scholarly
project. Far from desiring to present the Gran Colombia, as we said above,
as a utopia to return to (as Larrazábal and other Liberals in the nineteenth
century do, particularly José Tadeo Monagas), Gil Fortoul constructs it as
a worthy and admirable moment in the larger story of the Venezuelan
nation, a knowable period that simply concludes, no longer, then, in an
oppositional relationship to the republic that came into being by seceding
from it. It is a foundation for the stable historical knowledge he seeks to
create for dissemination. But politics and other factors must be accounted
for. He tells us that Bolívar at the 1828 Ocaña Convention had wanted to
end the Gran Colombia but that his own deputies prevented the aging and
sickly leader from doing so. We see Bolívar making contradictory state-
ments. Taking advantage of a weakened leader, one of his lieutenants dis-
courages him from ending the state by speaking of the ignominious
manner in which San Martín left the continent, retiring. Does Bolívar
want to conclude his military and political career in the way the Argentine
liberator did? Bolívar was still a realist but he was manhandled. Here, Gil
Fortoul is demonstrating the purportedly clear causes that explain Bolívar’s
behavior, starting with his physical condition and vulnerability. This is not
the Rousseau-inspired Bolívar who, as we saw in his 1828 letter to Páez
cited at the beginning of Chap. 1, states that he will not submit to the
 5  FROM LIBERALISM TO POSITIVISM: GIL FORTOUL AND VALLENILLA LANZ  135

general will as represented by Santander’s state. The actions of Gil

Fortoul’s Bolívar are not based on ideas but rather what is happening in
his body and mind as determined by his physical state, psychological make-
­up, and environment. Even the creator of the Gran Colombia, which
would be so important discursively in the nineteenth century, did not
believe in his state in the final years, according to Gil Fortoul.
In this effort at sealing off and monumentalizing what, let us repeat,
John Lynch sees only as a necessary military structure, Rodríguez O. as a
reflection of Bolívar’s dictatorial tendencies, Jeremy Adelman as a symp-
tom of the dissolution of the Spanish empire, and Elliott as an outgrowth
of Enlightenment thought, Gil Fortoul has one aim: to protect Bolívar in
his role as a rational head of state, and thus to maintain his legality. Gil
Fortoul thus explains the complex politics that, he argues, causes the June
1828 Ocaña Convention to fail, forcing Bolívar to declare a dictatorship
after having already called upon the special powers afforded him by the
Cúcuta Constitution. As for the execution of his would-be assassins, he
excuses him again by saying that he was pressured in his weakened state to
do so by his generals. But Gil Fortoul also justifies Bolívar’s controversial
provisional dictatorship of 1828–1830 as a necessary response to major
threats to the union’s dissolution. Those threats consisted of the Gran
Colombia’s abrogation of its constitution at the Ocaña Convention, prior
to reaching an agreement on a new one; Venezuela’s continuing policy of
not recognizing the authority of Bogotá, Páez described by the authorities
in the state’s capital as illegally breaking with the Gran Colombia; and the
fact that an ungrateful Peru, having been liberated by the Gran Colombia,
then attacked it on its southern borders.
Gil Fortoul wants us to see the passage from the Gran Colombia—
which he is presenting as a state destined to fail—to Venezuela just as it is.
One order is coming apart. Another is coming into being. History moves
forward within the boundaries of legality and illegality, the state always
legal because it is the state. But if his critical framework for understanding
change is tautological, not all new regimes obtain the status of legality.
The United States of Venezuela that comes into being after the Federal
War with the 1864 constitution has no validity as a structure, the result of
military pronouncements in the name of already accomplished political
values. The Gran Colombia, then, is a crucial discursive site for the national
history that he is constructing and that revolves around social classes,
institutions, and constitutions. It is one of three states, including the colo-
nial and republic, all part of the story of an evolving nation.
136  R. T. CONN

At the heart of the republican period of Venezuela are the constitutions

promoted and promulgated. Gil Fortoul does not only speak of the par-
ticular social realities behind those constitutions, realities that reflect the
interests of social classes, he also seeks to create a constitutional tradition
for Venezuela that is autochthonous. He does this by positing new begin-
nings for Venezuelan Constitutions, starting with the one Francisco de
Miranda wrote in London in 1808 and celebrating the constitution Bolívar
wrote for Bolivia in 1826.
To be sure, for Gil Fortoul the intellectual Bolívar is first and foremost
an author of constitutions, not only of the Bolivian Constitution, but also
of the one he proposed in the Angostura Address. But forget underlining
Bolívar’s links to European and classical sources, most notably
Montesquieu, Rousseau, and the English parliamentary system, or, to
frame this differently, the fact that he was shuffling multiple models to
create his own. Instead, in an effort to establish a Venezuelan and Latin
America tradition, he makes the Bolivian Constitution which was rejected,
just as San Martín’s constitutional monarchy was, he tells us, occupy cen-
ter stage as a model of government—an extension of what is proposed by
Bolívar in 1819. Citing the words of an admirer from the 1820s, he
describes it as representing the pinnacle of all theory in political science for
South America, with the person whose words he includes stating that it is
certain to provide the basis of happiness in the societies that adopt it, and
that it should be considered a constitution written not just for Bolivia but
for all of humanity:

Such was the enthusiasm with which his admirers received it that one of
them wrote the following: “This is not only the constitution of Bolivia, it is
not only a constitution but a summary of all the good that men have known
in the science of government, the germ of an immense happiness that will
develop in the midst of those societies that have the good fortune to adopt
it.” Exaggerated lyricism, no doubt: but, with all that and without leaving
the theoretical sphere, a lyricism that is not that far away from the truth,
because, yes, it can be affirmed that the constitutional projects of Bolívar,
that of Angostura and that of Lima, are the most notable political-­
philosophical speculation in South American history.18

The idea of happiness as a criterion in and of itself for judging constitu-

tions, we know, was the brainchild of the British utilitarian philosopher
Jeremy Bentham whom Bolívar met in 1810 and with whom he corre-
 5  FROM LIBERALISM TO POSITIVISM: GIL FORTOUL AND VALLENILLA LANZ  137

sponded in 1823 and 1825; Bolívar himself uses the idea of maximizing
happiness to authorize his vision in the Angostura Address. But now, Gil
Fortoul is slyly dressing the constitution up to reflect Bentham’s and his
disciple John Stuart Mill’s concept of happiness for the majority, without
stating anything about the categories of liberty or social reform that were
important to both thinkers. To elevate it in this new way, he also explains
its brief life as a constitution. For Gil Fortoul, the positivist, what matters
in the end, as we have seen earlier, is not only whether a constitution is
good in and of itself, but also whether it is effective, meaning whether it is
accepted as corresponding to lived reality. Bolívar had hoped to have it
serve as the blueprint for his Federation of the Andes, which, we know,
never materialized. Gil Fortoul, though, is only interested in the national
iteration of the constitution, not the massive regional one that Bolívar
outlined in letters. To this end, he writes not about Bolívar’s publicity
campaign in connection to the Federation of the Andes but rather of the
circumstances that saw the constitution introduced in Peru and Bolivia,
then rejected. First, he underlines that Peru and Bolivia initially looked
upon it with absolute admiration. Then, he explains the circumstances
under which it was rejected. There were two factors. One was the level of
education of the actors in power: legislators and leaders, whom he charac-
terizes as “ignorant caudillos” and who for this reason were myopic in
their views. The other was the politics of the moment. Gil Fortoul tells his
readers that the new state functioned successfully under Sucre until
Peruvian armed forces entered the country to seek reunification of the
two Perus.19
But the times having changed, Venezuela now purportedly on the cusp
of having stability and a political elite capable of understanding the docu-
ment’s merit, Gil Fortoul makes the Bolivian Constitution available as a
model that can be an alternative to Venezuela’s US-based constitutional
political tradition, providing, as he says it does, for the autonomy of the
branches of the legislature and the courts without the possibility of politi-
cizing them—a foundation for a system of civil law. The Venezuela at the
turn of the twentieth century was different from the Bolivia of the late
1820s. Venezuela could draw on seven decades of history for the purpose
of defining a proper form of national government. The Bolivian
Constitution with its lifetime president offers a model for that lived reality
of those seven decades. Instructive was the long tenure of the Monagas
brothers and of Antonio Guzmán Blanco who stayed in power through
proxies.20 It is a constitution that he places against the nation’s first consti-
138  R. T. CONN

tution—the matrix of all to follow—playing on the binary of originality

and imitation so important in European and Latin American thought in
the final decades of the nineteenth century. He had written earlier in
Volume I: “And in the end the imitation of the American system, with
some variations, triumphed.”21 In opposition to that system, he is making
the Bolivian Constitution available not only as something that is unique,
an expression of Venezuela’s new post-Guerra Federal needs, but also as a
constitution that can stand on its own as something approaching a repub-
lican document.
Gil Fortoul did not see himself, then, as indicating a brand new path for
the state, but as providing a political form that channeled the Venezuelan
political will while perhaps also legitimizing what Cipriano Castro, to
whom he dedicates the volumes, had already done with his 1901 and
1904 constitutions, the first proclaimed after he took Caracas, the second
after he defeated Matos. In the first constitution, Castro lengthened the
presidency to six years, removed direct and universal suffrage, and termi-
nated the Federal Council consisting of one representative for each state.
The latter two had been established by the 1893 constitution. In the place
of direct and universal suffrage, the 1901 constitution called for the
municipalities to elect the president while the 1904 constitution called for
an electoral college. In what was another innovation, there would be two
vice presidents, also to be voted by the electoral college. The two constitu-
tions looked a lot like the Bolivian Constitution. In this new constitutional
moment for the country, caudillos would no longer need to leave their
estates with their militias to dispute or manage a presidential election as
there would no longer be popular elections.
Importantly, in the documents section at the end of Gil Fortoul’s 1907
Volume I, he includes both Miranda’s 1808 constitution with its proposal
for Roman censors and Bolívar’s 1819 Moral Branch that is subsumed in
the 1826 Bolivian Constitution. He is presenting Venezuelan actors with
models to consider as they look for ways to outfit their constitution with
positivist features bearing on morality and education. In his Angostura
Address, Bolívar said that a well-oiled political system is not enough. There
must also be men of character to lead and a strong educational system. Gil
Fortoul envisions a state that has the right to preside over the spiritual and
moral well-being of its citizens with less concern for liberties and rights.
Gil Fortoul would come out with a new version of Historia constitucio-
nal de Venezuela in 1930, at the time of the centenary celebration of
 5  FROM LIBERALISM TO POSITIVISM: GIL FORTOUL AND VALLENILLA LANZ  139

Venezuelan independence from the Gran Colombia and of Bolívar’s death.

These volumes, as we will see in Chap. 7, will be quite different.
Vallenilla Lanz directed Latin American positivism down a distinctly
dark reactionary path. As early as 1910, just two years after Gómez took
power, he wrote Influencia del 19 de abril en la independencia sur-­
americana (The Influence of April 19 in the Independence of South America),
winner of a competition for best national history organized by the gover-
nor of Caracas and a work he dedicated to Gómez.22 Here he mocks the
constitution of 1811 as a mere imitation of that of the United States, say-
ing nothing of the triumvirate and nothing of the oligarchy that, accord-
ing to Gil Fortoul, it served. He asserts that had the drafters actually
thought about what a proper constitution for Venezuela should look like
instead of simply using that of the United States, they would have realized
that the idea of federalism, that is, of a country with self-­governing prov-
inces forming part of the larger state, was a fiction when the only political
unit that had had significance for the population was that of the munici-
pality. Citing from the work of the Venezuelan historian Rafael María
Baralt, he tells of how in 1556 Venezuelans reverted to this unit on the
orders upon his death of a Spanish governor, Licenciado Villacindio, who
instructed them to govern themselves in this way until a new governor was
appointed.
But what was a privilege under special circumstances quickly came to be
perceived by ambitious mayors as a right subsequent to the king’s decision
to issue a written order on December 8, 1560, that formalized the order
given by Villacindio. The king did this, we are told, subsequent to entreat-
ies from a representative from the town of Trujillo who had gone to the
court to request favors for his province, which the king granted. Jump
forward 250 years. On April 19, 1810, Venezuelans revert to the unit of
the municipality, forming local governmental bodies. Their example
inspired peoples of the Spanish-American colonies to do the same.23
Vallenilla Lanz turns the story of Spanish Americans forming cabildos
or juntas inside out, primitivizing that act as ethnically determined.
Further, in Venezuela the distinguished founding fathers move quickly,
too quickly, not understanding the phenomenon before them. With the
1811 constitution, ratified just months after the declaration of indepen-
dence on July 5, they elect to divide the country into states. The drafters
of the 1830 constitution correct the error by dissolving those states and
placing the municipalities directly under the authority of Caracas. As for
Bolívar, in the 1812 Cartagena Manifesto he shows that he does not
140  R. T. CONN

understand this history, incorrectly attributing the fragmentation he

observes to the 1811 constitution, that is to the modern political idea of
federalism, rather than to Venezuela’s now ethnically defined colonial his-
tory.24 Vallenilla Lanz goes on to say that the civil wars of the nineteenth
century, not only those of Venezuela, but also those of all Spanish-
American countries, can be explained using these critical terms.
The competing groups in those wars break down as follows. On the
one hand, there are the Spanish-American municipalities and their prov-
inces that subsequent to the collapse of the colonial state revert to their
primitive instincts, instincts that drive them anew to be sovereign with
federalist thought providing a cover for what is in fact a pathology. On the
other, there are the lettered elites who seek to impose on their countries
constitutional models from outside Latin America. The error on the part
of the elites is that they assume these constitutions to have universal value
when they are really products themselves of particular national evolution-
ary histories. The constitution of the United States that is thought to be
universal is really the product of a specific social evolution.
Vallenilla Lanz continues this line of argumentation in his famous 1919
work, Cesarismo democrático, where he presents Bolívar as a sociologist
avant la lettre, as he had in previous writings, writings laced with socio-
logical and race paradigms coming out of Europe and of which he pro-
claimed mastery.25 He claims that Bolívar was a leader worthy of emulation
for the present on account of the caudillo-like position he assumed upon
his return from Peru. Constructing an inside and an outside, one defined
by the mission of liberation, and the other by that of government, Vallenilla
Lanz tells us that this is the moment at which Bolívar frees himself of the
myopia into which he plunged when he was outside the Gran Colombia,
the Enlightenment principles of reason and culture to which he subscribed
being the content of that myopia, and embraces social order as an ideal
that is superior to that of liberty.
Bolívar’s texts remain important to Vallenilla Lanz, only now in the
context of the categories of unruliness and criminality he calls upon to
define Bolívar as a leader concerned about the Venezuelan population’s
proclivity to disorder. Going to them, he cites moments in which Bolívar
addresses the challenge of creating a citizenry out of whole cloth, moments
both before the defeat of the Spanish in 1825 and afterward. One case
cited is from Bolívar’s 1815 Jamaica Letter, where he addresses indisci-
pline among the creole elites to help explain the fall of the Second
Republic. His argument is that members of that class had lacked the disci-
 5  FROM LIBERALISM TO POSITIVISM: GIL FORTOUL AND VALLENILLA LANZ  141

pline necessary to prevail because they had had no experience in public

office. The Spanish Crown had denied them the possibility of holding
administrative positions. In Vallenilla Lanz’s hands, the textual moment
becomes something else—not a Bolívar defending independence by point-
ing to the problem of a colonial population with no administrative experi-
ence, but rather a Bolívar concerned about disorder among the masses,
raised to the level of criminal unruliness.
Social order, then, just as in the case of Gil Fortoul, is the concept around
which Vallenilla Lanz builds his critical discourse. Attacking Venezuelan
white elite subjectivity in a way similar to how Gil Fortoul does in his discus-
sion of the colonial period, he speaks of a slave-holding creole class, the
mantuanos, that in the 1790s and 1800s sought to exclude the rising pardo
class from public life, the Spanish colonial state supporting the pardo com-
munity and free blacks in order to diminish its authority. In his attack on the
upper-society creoles, he goes on to speak of the war of independence in
Venezuela as a civil war, which of course it was in part. Vallenilla Lanz is
seeking to undo an historiographical tradition pitting independentist creoles
against Spain with the former the principal protagonists of Venezuelan his-
tory. This is a tradition with a long history, promoted by Felipe Larrazábal,
then by Guzmán Blanco with the 1810 narrative he instituted, and the
publication of O’Leary’s volumes. It is a tradition that comes out of Bolívar’s
key texts such as the Jamaica Letter. But in calling the conflict a civil war,
Vallenilla Lanz also has as his target royalist creoles who opposed indepen-
dence and who looked to the 1812 Spanish Constitution.
One source to which Vallenilla Lanz goes to recover the purported facts
of Venezuela’s perpetual civil war is, interestingly enough, the letters of
the enemy, Spanish General Pablo Morillo, el Pacificador, collected by
O’Leary. Vallenilla Lanz has Morillo stand as an impartial commentator
on the lack of union among the creoles, and in particular, on the protago-
nism of royalist creoles in the cause of defending the Spanish imperial
state, in this way drawing from the Archivo del Libertador in a manner
unexpected. Royalist creoles were the most violent among the enemies of
the independentist creoles, not Spanish soldiers.26 The message from
Vallenilla Lanz is that we are not to heed Bolívar when he describes
Spaniards as violent—Venezuelans are.
With this, Vallenilla Lanz is not only disabusing his readership of what
he wants to reduce to myth—Bolívar’s own texts and Larrazábal’s biogra-
phy having falsely created the idea of a unified creole class that fought the
Spanish—but is also establishing an anchor for his social history of a popu-
142  R. T. CONN

lation absolutely unmoored when the decision was made to separate and
when royalist creoles returned after independence to form part of the new
republic, bringing with them their resentment, many having lost their
lands. The truth of division and violence continues after the independence
period, contaminating the republic. Venezuelans would seem doomed.
The key moment that he is elevating is not July 5 or December 21 of
1811 but April 19, 1810, which he now describes even more dramatically
than he does in 1910 as the beginning of an undefined, parochial revolu-
tion in Latin America, the opposite of Guzmán Blanco’s glorious Liberal
revolution. In Spain, which interestingly he ties to Venezuela as part of
one and the same historical process thrust upon the Hispanic world, the
sin of fragmentation came not as a decision but as an imposition.27 The
all-important date to which he returns again is 1808, the year of the
Napoleonic invasion. Vallenilla Lanz speaks of the period of the Napoleonic
occupation, the house arrest of Fernando VII, and the Cortes as years
when Spain saw no more than disconnected military action against
Napoleon in the towns and cities of Spain under the leadership of five dif-
ferent regional leaders.
With this, he entirely sets aside parliamentary tradition, newly estab-
lished in 1810, describing Latin Americans and Spaniards as sharing the
same tendency toward parochialism or what he defines as federalism, a
form that he reduces to localism, whatever ideology might fuel it, and
whose existence, furthermore, trumps all else, particularly the project of
making a single nation. From the time of Fernando VII’s death in 1833,
the constitutional movement of the Cortes with its roots in the years of
1810–1814 and 1820–1823 faced off with both Carlists, who sought to
return to an absolute monarchy, and progressive and radical groups that
were offshoots of the Cortes, finally taking a more stable form under the
complex maneuvering of Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, whose idea to
rotate the position of prime minister between himself and a Liberal
counterpart in the years going from 1874 until 1897 proved successful.
Spain’s constitutional history is represented as having no reality, no effi-
cacy. In the stark terms with which he sought to manipulate discourse, the
story of Spain, like that of Latin America, is one in which instinctual forces
of disintegration have dominated ever since the Napoleonic occupation.
As one would imagine he would, Vallenilla Lanz also did much with the
War to the Death. He speaks, as we have said, of the royalist creoles who
return with their resentment. But there is a larger narrative. Taking advan-
tage of Bolívar’s War to the Death pronouncement on June 15, 1813, he
 5  FROM LIBERALISM TO POSITIVISM: GIL FORTOUL AND VALLENILLA LANZ  143

tells a story of dissension and violence going all the way forward to the
Federal War of 1859–1863. He finds not only violence, but also illegality
everywhere. He calls into question Bolívar’s claim to have unified the
creoles in Venezuela in the 1820s, while he declares that the creators of
the constitution for the Gran Colombia at the Congress of Cúcuta legis-
lated illegally, two of the regions, Venezuela and Ecuador, still not free.
He characterizes the creators of the 1811 constitution in the same way. In
the period of the republic he dismisses the relative peace that the republic
had obtained from 1831 to 1858, telling of the suppressed and concealed
resentments to which we have pointed, tendencies toward violence, as
well as of profoundly problematic lineages that trump one’s ideology.
None other than the founder of the Liberal Party, Antonio Leocadio
Guzmán, was a highly contradictory figure when considered in the con-
text of his biological lineage. According to the critical terms he has con-
structed using theorists from the time, such as Gustave Le Bon, lineage is
destiny. He reveals that Guzmán was in fact descended from a father who
had been a Spanish captain.28 Here was reality. What he became as an
adult was theater.
By such troubling ploys, Vallenilla Lanz was delegitimizing an indi-
vidual as well as a party. His target was not only the Liberal Party, but
also the Conservative, the former founded by Guzmán in 1840, the lat-
ter in response to it a few years later, with the members of the latter said
by Vallenilla Lanz to subscribe to liberal ideology in the same way that
Liberals did. There was no justification of the two parties at the level of
political principle. Add to this that members of the parties did not choose
them but inherited their affiliations: Liberals consist of individuals who
are descendants of royalists; and Conservatives of descendants of patri-
ots. There was more. He also addressed the discord and violence in the
country during the Federal War, particularly on the side of the conflict
that belonged to Liberals. They were not the result of the political prin-
ciples fought over, the values, that is, of liberty and equality that were
championed by Liberal leaders from Leocadio Guzmán to Felipe
Larrazábal. How could liberty and equality be the root cause, he sub-
mits, if the conditions for propagandizing did not exist? Ideas, in the
end, must be communicated. On the one hand, the public, he states, was
illiterate; on the other, there were not enough newspaper print runs to
ensure that copies would be available to the few who were literate. Here
was the evidence that this book- and written-word centered intellectual
144  R. T. CONN

was creating using sociological models—models that did not recognize

orality as a space of transmission. The conclusion: Liberalism—which,
with its different emphases, had been accepted as the driving force
behind the Guerra Federal—could not have played that role for the rea-
son that the material conditions necessary for it to be properly consumed
by the population at large were inexistent. Political declarations and
military uprisings aside, in its nineteenth-century Venezuelan iteration it
was a fiction, with urban intellectuals who wrote in newspapers to incite
the masses literally only speaking to themselves. There were only the
“superior classes,” as he calls them, who did not care about principles.29
Once again, positivism was producing its Other. The issue was not that
something happened. It was how it happened.
What was the cause of the mass mobilization that resulted in the death
of more than 100,000 people if not the political parties of lore and their
partisan intellectuals who had neither the ability to propagandize (printing
press runs severely limited), nor a public to propagandize (the illiteracy
rate high)? Drawing upon the French criminologist Gabriel Tarde,
Vallenilla Lanz asserts that it was a tightening and rationalization of the
legal order at the hands of an emerging state that, under the control of the
Conservative Party, unrealistically challenged the impunity to which the
popular classes had grown accustomed—examples of their crimes being
cattle rustling and robbery at gunpoint. The expectation of impunity had
deep roots, insists Vallenilla Lanz, the result of 15 years of war in which
military leaders offered their soldiers and recruits the promise of others’
property, and one, for this reason, that could not be reversed overnight
without consequence.30
The law could not work. Enlightenment could not work. The specific
people Vallenilla Lanz names are the legendary plainsmen, whom he
defines as uneducated and incapable of making their own decisions, avail-
able always to be led, but who are historically necessary, representing the
awakening of a people. These men again come to form part of Páez’s
troops after he assumes the presidency in 1830. He presents the caudillo,
furthermore, as being one of them, representing not a force standing in
the way of modernization, but on the contrary, a new modern subject—
the figure who raises himself up from the lower classes to occupy power,
legitimately representing that power by virtue of having at a psychological
level the support of the majority. For Vallenilla Lanz, with his incorpora-
tion of liberalism’s language of minorities and majorities, that first caudillo
is Páez, the product of a Venezuela transformed by the independence pro-
 5  FROM LIBERALISM TO POSITIVISM: GIL FORTOUL AND VALLENILLA LANZ  145

cess, with new social actors in power, a Venezuela whose modernity con-
sists not in the incorporation of ideas from outside of Venezuela—the
paradigm he seeks to defeat paradoxically in the name of the conservative
post-1871 Paris Commune models he calls upon and to which he accords
universal authority—but in the belief in social mobility that had arisen
within the struggle for power. “From that moment the pyramid was defin-
itively inverted.”31
Páez had escaped the worst of the violence during what Vallenilla Lanz
calls Venezuela’s civil war, 1813 and 1814. This is important as he cannot
allow Páez to be seen as one more person caught up in his decades-long
struggle defined by violence. Páez joined Bolívar’s ranks in 1818, and
therefore never had to enter into battle against his Venezuelan brothers
since the fighting in Venezuela following 1814, with Fernando VII’s recon-
quest, had been increasingly against soldiers from Spain. Páez could, for
this reason, stand symbolically for the ideals of peace, order, and national
community. The leader is different from the people, from the masses.
But the critical work performed by Vallenilla Lanz’s colleague, Gil
Fortoul, stood in the way. Vallenilla Lanz must reconstruct Páez as a
model for leadership by separating him from the political tradition and
class structure against which Páez, he tells, launches his revolution, as
someone completely different, then, from the figure who is a representa-
tive or product of Gil Fortoul’s oligarchy, his level of education or civiliza-
tion owing to the lessons he received from that social class, and someone
completely different from the figure who is irrelevant by the time of the
Federal War—the oligarchy no longer dominant. Nor are his vast land-
holdings to be regarded as ill-gotten, a leader who took advantage of the
voucher system to accumulate those lands for himself and whose wealth
along with that of Carlos Soublette were denounced by Liberals in the
Federal War. Furthermore, Páez is not to be known either as the father of
the Conservative Party—the same party that Gil Fortoul describes, along
with the Liberal, as the parties of the oligarchies. We are told that he is a
natural student, first learning from the British soldiers and officials with
whom he served, and never stopping, his appetite for civilization vora-
cious.32 As for his landed wealth, Vallenilla Lanz describes it as that which
a leader must have to perform his role in the nation. Vallenilla Lanz, who
is always certain to cite his sources—one of the bases for his academic
authority—quotes the US American founding father, John Adams, to
explain the importance of the possession of property for leadership of a
nation. He has obtained the quote, as he carefully explains in an endnote,
146  R. T. CONN

from the writings of the Italian sociologist and political economist, Achille
Loria. Critical reason should not be used to judge Páez. Rather, one
should consult the so-called laws of nature as defined by psychologists and
sociologists, laws explaining how societies come into being, with evolu-
tion being the premise. What matters is instinct, which justifies what is and
what is necessary:

And, instinctively, giving in this way a more solid foundation to his political
superiority, he became the most powerful landowner of the country, as if he
had guessed that famous aphorism of John Adams, one of the founders of
the United States, proven time and again by the history of all peoples.
“Those that possess land have in their hands the destiny of their nations.”33

The question of how property is acquired is erased, as the fact is that lead-
ers need it. It is a law of state development. Páez was wealthy for a reason
based on first principles or axioms, as was Juan Vicente Gómez. There was
nothing to challenge, nothing to think about. Vallenilla Lanz continues to
rebuild Páez for national consumption.
As one sees throughout the reactionary treatise, psychology, sociology,
and political science, with their reliance on first principles, all come
together. Using critical terms derived from the first two fields, Vallenilla
Lanz presents Páez, in the first instance, as a leader whose authority con-
sists not in a legal sense but in a psychological one. The country is still
unstable, finding itself “in the period of transition from mechanical soli-
darity to organic solidarity” and needing:

to be organized instinctively around the strongest and wisest one, the per-
son around whose personality the popular imagination had created the leg-
end, which is one of the most powerful psychological components of
prestige…and from whom was expected the most absolute protection, the
most complete impunity to which they were habituated.34

Forget, then, the jackets and ties in which Páez and his successors
dressed and that could lead one to think that it was liberal principles that
organized the country, or the fact that Páez governed with a congress that
he never dismantled. One needed to see beyond that to bring into focus
his non-rational essence as caudillo, the figure to whom the majority
responded and who was untainted by violence in a manner that other lead-
ers were not. This was the real Páez, the iteration of his figure that was
politically effective, born of a process that had razed the old to prepare the
way for the new, his figure the only one that could lead a country horribly
 5  FROM LIBERALISM TO POSITIVISM: GIL FORTOUL AND VALLENILLA LANZ  147

fragmented, with no group or social class able to be hegemonic but with

the posited totality of those individual groups and classes representing
Venezuela’s new democracy. Other Latin American countries, Vallenilla
Lanz argues, saw the creole elites resume their social and political author-
ity after independence. In Venezuela, where the social world had been
re-making itself, the country’s elites did not. The mistake was that Páez
was not allowed to be himself, that is, to exercise civil authority in the way
he had exercised military, governing without the legal apparatus he found
himself having to implement subsequent to the coming into being of the
republic in 1831, having himself lived by the law of impunity, leading the
plainsmen against established authority, then leading Venezuelans against
the Gran Colombia, in what is described as Venezuela’s democratic revo-
lution, a revolution that was, Vallenilla Lanz underlines, legitimate.
In this last formulation, Vallenilla Lanz is using Páez to position
Venezuela in relationship to the political idea of democracy that had for
the entire history of the republic been the key political concept. It had
been promoted by the United States, and figures across the Americas had
been adapting it to their own needs by constructing national traditions in
the name of democracy even when that meant, as it often did, using the
concept as the basis for an explicitly hierarchical vision of the modern pub-
lic sphere.
An example of such positionings of the concept can be seen in the
Uruguayan José Enrique Rodó, who in his widely read essay of 1900,
Ariel, calls upon some of the same French sociologists and historians used
by Vallenilla Lanz. Rodó argues that democracy is both necessary and
insufficient; that while the value of equality is the essential condition for
access to education, the goal of Latin American society must be high cul-
ture, by which he means a civil and political community informed by what
he calls justified differences and hierarchies rooted in education, the arts,
and the professions. In Vallenilla Lanz’s version of this question, Páez is
the strongest of the strong and the wisest of the wise who is the product
of the new democratic spirit unleashed by the social forces of indepen-
dence, a person from the lower social class who rises to be the most
­meritorious in a world that, through the first two decades of the twentieth
century, has still not progressed enough to operate in accordance with the
imperatives of the liberal state but that must still rely on the figure of the
caudillo to shepherd the country. Here was a vision, let us emphasize, that
was entirely different from what other historians would tell us. John
Lynch, for example, presents Páez not as the representative of a new social
148  R. T. CONN

class but simply as the individual appointed by the white elite to do its bid-
ding as president of the republic; and also Gil Fortoul, for whom Páez is
the guarantor of the republican system representing the principle of
authority for Venezuela’s pre-modern, aristocratic elites.
But if Vallenilla Lanz fashions Páez by making the act of secession from
the Gran Colombia into a veritable rebellion with sweeping and definitive
social class implications, it is important to underline that he does not pit
Páez against Bolívar, much less speak of Bolívar’s expulsion. He does,
though, link Bolívar to Venezuela’s aristocratic world of ideas, as defined
by republicanism saying that he is only an intermediate historical figure
who cedes, as he must, leadership of the country to Páez in 1827. In
presenting Bolívar as a figure who represents republicanism as a form of
political aristocratism, Vallenilla Lanz also shields him, as if Bolívar and
his state from which Venezuelans seceded were different. He submits that
Venezuelans did not revolt against his figure. Rather, referring once again
to that uncontestable force that lies below reason as a first principle and
that therefore is more real, Vallenilla Lanz tells us Venezuelans followed
Páez instinctively.
Vallenilla Lanz takes, however, a completely different view on the so-­
called rebellion in New Granada, going so far as to criminalize those
involved in the attempt to assassinate Bolívar on September 25, 1828, in
Bogotá, the capital of the Gran Colombia. Páez’s “rebellion” against the
Gran Colombia is celebrated, foundational in the formation of the mod-
ern state and therefore necessary. In contrast, the conspiracy of New
Granadan intellectuals, coming as it did from above as opposed to below,
as Vallenilla Lanz maintains according to his rhetoric of high and low, is
utterly without merit, a fact that justifies retaliation from Bolívar and
Urdaneta. Colombia’s liberal tradition is lawless, he asserts, deserving of
being repressed by the state.35
Later in the work appears a chapter entitled “The Bolivian Law.” Here
Vallenilla Lanz lays everything out for his Venezuelan and international
readers. He praises two of Bolívar’s texts: his 1812 Cartagena Manifesto,
where he critiques the 1811 constitution; and his Bolivian Constitution,
which Vallenilla Lanz describes as prescient. From the Bolivian Constitution
he isolates what he defines as the Bolivian law: the executive who names
his successor.36 But there is more. Vallenilla Lanz sees that law as the de
facto model for the successful leaders of the nineteenth-­century Latin
American states, from the Argentine under Juan Manuel de Rosas and
Julio Argentino Roca to the Ecuadorian under Gabriel García Moreno to
 5  FROM LIBERALISM TO POSITIVISM: GIL FORTOUL AND VALLENILLA LANZ  149

the Mexican under Porfirio Díaz to the Colombian under Rafáel Núnez.37
For Vallenilla Lanz, the Bolivian Constitution is the document that most
closely reflects the model of the caudillo that he recoups through French
positivism as gendarme and which he sees already embodied in his canon
of nineteenth-century personalistic heads of state who through their
power are the true and effective constitutions of their countries. As for
Bolivia, the country for which Bolívar wrote the constitution, he states
that it has never had “prestigious caudillos and true men of government,”
which explains its instability.38 Gil Fortoul in 1907 and 1909 was trying to
make the constitutional tradition work. Vallenilla Lanz, in 1919, had gone
in the opposite direction, declaring its utter uselessness. One had to attend
to reality.
Why this historian who labels his vision the “Bolivian law” and uses that
so-called law to support and legitimize authoritarian government in Latin
America would think to construct a defense of Gómez by way of the figure
of the caudillo by now should seem obvious. In a country where caudillo
politics held sway through the Revolución Libertadora, 1901–1903, and
beyond, with Gómez having to be concerned about insurrections from
different quarters, it makes sense that Vallenilla Lanz would want to model
his authoritarian executive on a political form that non-Venezuelans could
regard as either antiquated or strategically doomed, the more common
cover for authoritarianism being republicanism. Defining the caudillo as a
gendarme, meaning policeman from the French word of the same spell-
ing, he elevated that figure born in Venezuela’s, and more generally, Latin
America’s nineteenth century by dressing it up in the image of the French
sociological models of the day, models that conceived of the polis as a
space to be administered by intellectuals serving a strong executive, with
knowledge and order privileged over democracy, and with the latter, what
we might call institutionalized democracy, coming in the course of a
nation’s evolution.
As for the state models Vallenilla Lanz draws upon from contemporary
Latin America, we see him in an endnote at the conclusion of Cesarismo
democrático call upon the example of the major regional and world event
of the 1910s, the Mexican Revolution. At the time of the writing of the
document, the Mexican Revolution was in the throes of uncertainty,
there being no clarity about what would follow the first revolution of the
twentieth century that had come in reaction to the 30-year rule of Porfirio
Díaz, the most well-known period of Latin American positivism. Vallenilla
Lanz turns the moment of the Mexican Revolution to his favor, capital-
150  R. T. CONN

izing on the sense of dreams dashed to recover the figure of Porfirio Díaz
whom he names as part of his canon. The sense that all had failed was so
much evidence that the political structure exploded by the forces of the
revolution was, in the end, the correct one for modernizing Latin
American states, and in particular Venezuela.39 He also pays tribute to the
Mexican positivist Francisco Bulnes, one of the intellectuals who helped
build the theoretical justification for the Porfirian regime.40 What Latin
America still needed, as it had in the nineteenth century, were caudillos
capable of imposing order on their respective peoples not through con-
stitutions or the law but through their own personalities. This was the
remedy for what he describes as anarchy and rampant individualism, cir-
cumstances that could not be overcome by constitutions when constitu-
tions, as they were in Venezuela’s nineteenth century, changed so often
and/or were not upheld.
This was a vision Vallenilla Lanz extends to Europe in 1925, celebrating
Mussolini in Italy and Paco de Rivera in Spain. Trying to bring the French
and British political traditions into the orbit of the Venezuelan and citing
the work of French conservative authors, he states that the French are
really led by an unelected official in the person of the president of the
Council of Ministers and that England, the country that has given the
world the concept of oppositional parties, is a society in which voters elect
individuals on the basis of their personalities as proven by their love of
biographies.41 The reflections of Edmond de Fels and Émile Boutmy are
made to fit into his attack on so-called paper constitutions and his celebra-
tion of organic ones.
At the end of Cesarismo democrático, he offers to Venezuelans and non-­
Venezuelans the following formulation: whereas for Latin America Bolívar
is the symbol of the republican ideal, for Venezuela he is “the sacred sym-
bol of its nationality and the motherland.”42 What exactly is the republican
Bolívar’s historical place in Venezuela? He states that Bolívar ascended to
the apex of Venezuelan history. But in the final years of his career he
understood the country’s racial composition as creating the conditions for
anarchy and that there was a need then for leaders who were not wedded
to constitutions or laws to control disorder. He realizes that the organism
that is society takes precedence over the world of ideas. On the subject of
leadership, Vallenilla Lanz says more. He explains further that Bolívar’s
purpose as a leader was to make way for national caudillos, which New
Granadans had not been able to see when they precipitously sought
to assassinate him, criminally transgressing the evolutionary laws of
 5  FROM LIBERALISM TO POSITIVISM: GIL FORTOUL AND VALLENILLA LANZ  151

nations. Finally, Vallenilla Lanz’s nation- and race-based model of gover-

nance that replaces Enlightenment-based models, just as that of the French
historian Hippolyte Taine does, is borne out by the history of indepen-
dence as he tells it, a history he presents as one of maturation going from
unmoored idealism to realism, from the 1811 constitution to the model
of the caudillo as discovered in the figure of Páez at the end of the inde-
pendence period, with lessons taught, from, we might also say, high to
low. Was history going backward or forward?

Notes
1. Ernest Ranan, The Future of Science (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1893), 30.
2. Todd A. Diacon, Stringing Together a Nation: Cándido Mariano de Silva
Rondon and the Construction of a Modern Brasil, 1906–1930 (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2004).
3. Hiram Bingham, Review of Historia constitucional de Venezuela, The
American Historical Review, 15, no 4 (1910): 906–908.
4. José Gil Fortoul, Tomo II. Historia constitucional de Venezuela. La oligar-
quía conservadora. La oligarquía liberal (Berlin: Carl Heymann, 1909),
248. “…hay que restar, en efecto, los cuatro años de las revueltas de
Monagas, Gabante, los reformistas y Farián; y del tesoro público los mil-
lones usados para reestablecer la paz.” “…one must, in effect, subtract, the
four years of insurrections of Monagas, Gabante, the reformists, and
Farián; and from the public treasury the millions used to reestablish the
peace.”
5. José Gil Fortoul, Tomo 1. Historia constitucional de Venezuela, Book 1–3
(Berlin: Carl Heymann, 1907), 261.
6. Ibid., 260. “…de regular estatura, ojos azules, barbilampiño y tez algo
rosada.”
7. Ibid., 260–261.
8. Ibid., 372–373.
9. Ibid., 233. “Los criollos blancos, autores de la revolución, fueron sus prim-
era víctimas.” See also, 233–235 on Gil Fortoul’s view on the protagonism
of the white creoles and their sacrifices as well as how they inspire the
popular classes.
10. Ibid., 211, 223–224.
11. José Gil Fortoul, Tomo II. Historia constitucional de Venezuela. La oligar-
quía conservadora. La oligarquía liberal (Berlin: Carl Heymann, 1909),
328–329. “A contar desde 1830 todas las revoluciones habían fracasado.
La de Monagas el 31, la de Gabante el 34, la de Reformas el 35, la de
Farían el 37, la de los liberales guzmancistas el 46, las de Páez en los años
152  R. T. CONN

de 48 y 49, las de conservadores y liberales en 53 y 54, fueron fácilmente

vencidas por el Gobierno constitucional. En los seis años que siguen al plan
ursurpador de 1857, sucede lo contrario: triunfa contra Monagas la revo-
lución de marzo; los batallones de Casas derrocan a Castro en 1859: los
preturianos de Echuzuría deponent a Gual y proclaman la dictadura en
1861; vence finalmente la Federación al Gobierno dictatorial de Páez en
1863. Y seguirán triunfando otras revoluciones. No cabe duda que al des-
garrarse la constitución del año 30, hubo en este país un profundo choque
moral, que dejó desorientada la Oligarquía, hasta su próxima desaparición,
y abrió el cauce donde veremos a la democracia venezolana fluctuar por
largos años entre el tumulto anárquico al orden despótico.”
12. Ibid., 314.
13. Ibid., 422.
14. See the following blog, accessed July 2019. https://www.venezuelatuya.
com/historia/revolucion_libertadora.htm.
15. Gil Fortoul, Tomo 1. Historia constitucional de Venezuela, 385. “…un ejér-
cito de 60,000 hombres de infantería y caballería, y una armada de veintio-
cho buques, con el objeto defenderse de España.”
16. Ibid., 384–386.
17. José Gil Fortoul, Tomo II. Historia constitucional de Venezuela. La oligar-
quía conservadora. La oligarquía liberal (Berlin: Carl Heymann, 1909),
537. “En suma González y Larrazábal, a semejanza de Baralt, aunque con
estilo moderno, consideran todavía la producción histórica como un
género puramente literario. No realizan aun…el concepto de la historia
política…”
18. Ibid., 386.
19. Gil Fortoul. Tomo I., 347. English translation mine. “Fue tal el entusi-
asmo con que lo acogieron al principio sus admiradores, que uno de ellos
escribió lo siguiente: ‘Esta no es sólo la constitución de Bolivia, no es sólo
una constitción, sino el resumen de todo lo bueno que los hombres han
sabido en la ciencia de gobierno, y el germen de una felicidad inmensa que
se desarrollará en medio de las sociedades que tengan la dicha de adop-
tarla.’ Lirismo, exagerado, sin duda; pero, con todo y sin salir de la esfera
teórica, lirismo que no se aparta mucho de la verdad, porque sí puede
afirmarse que los proyectos constitucionales de Bolívar, el de Angostura y
el de Lima, son la más notable especulación filosófica-política de la historia
sudamericana.”
20. Ibid., 349.
21. Ibid., 159. “Y triunfó al final la imitación al sistema americano, con algu-
nos variantes.”
22. Laureano Vallenilla Lanz, Influencia Del 19 De Abril De 1810 En La
Independencia Sur-americana (Caracas: Empresa El Cojo), 1910.
5  FROM LIBERALISM TO POSITIVISM: GIL FORTOUL AND VALLENILLA LANZ  153

23. Laureano Vallenilla Lanz, 1910, Influencia del 19 de abril en la indepen-

dencia sur-americana (Caracas: Empresa El Cojo), 21–22.
24. Ibid., 20–21.
25. Laureano Vallenilla Lanz, Cesarismo democrático y otros textos (Caracas:
Fundación Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1991). Please note that I am using two
editions of this text: the 1919 edition, indicated below, and the 1991
edition.
26. See Laureano Vallenilla Lanz, Cesarismo democrático: estudios sobre las bases
sociologicas de la constitucion efectiva de Venezuela (Caracas: Empresa El
Cojo, 1919), and Simón Bolívar and Daniel Florencio O’Leary. Cartas
Del Libertador: Memorias Del General O’Leary (Caracas: Impr. del
gobiérno nacional, 1888).
27. Vallenilla Lanz, Cesarismo democrático: estudios sobre las bases sociologicas de
la constitucion efectiva de Venezuela (1919), 52.
28. Laureano Vallenilla Lanz, Cesarismo democrático y otros textos (Caracas:
Fundación Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1991), 31–33.
29. Ibid., 140.
30. Ibid., 135.
31. Ibid.,  143. “Desde entonces la pirámide quedó definitivamente
invertida.”
32. Ibid., 104.
33. Ibid., 104–105. “E, instintivamente, dando así más sólidos fundamentos a
su preponderancia política, llegó a ser el más fuerte propietario territorial
del país, como si hubiera adivinado aquel célebre aforismo de John Adams,
uno de los fundadores de los Estados Unidos, comprobado hasta la sacie-
dad por la historia de todos los pueblos: ‘Aquellos que poseen la tierra
tienen en sus manos los destinos de las naciones.’”
34. Laureano Vallenilla Lanz, Cesarismo democrático y otros textos (Caracas:
Fundación Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1991), 136–137.
35. Vallenilla Lanz, Cesarismo democrático: estudios sobre las bases sociologicas de
la constitucion efectiva de Venezuela (1919), 213.
36. Laureano Vallenilla Lanz, Cesarismo democrático y otros textos (Caracas:
Fundación Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1991), 113–114. About Porfirio Díaz, he
writes, “…and practicing the Bolivian law even in the power to name the
successor…” (“…y practicando la ley Boliviana hasta en la facultad de
nombrar el sucesor…”).
37. Ibid., 113–114.
38. Ibid., 115–116. “La ausencia casi absoluta de caudillos prestigiosos y de
veradaderos hombres de gobierno…. The almost complete absence of
prestigious caudillos and true men of government.”
39. Ibid., 148.
40. Ibid., 132.
154  R. T. CONN

41. Ibid., September 25, 1925, “Las constituciones de papel y las constitucio-
nes orgánicas” (Caracas: El Nuevo Diario), 195.
42. Laureano Vallenilla Lanz, Cesarismo democrático: estudios sobre las bases
sociologicas de la constitucion efectiva de Venezuela (Caracas: Empresa El
Cojo, 1919), 307. “…aquella en cuyo vértice respladece la figura incompa-
rable del LIBERTADOR, que si es para toda la América ‘el símbolo del
ideal republicano’, es también para los venezolanos el símbolo sagrado de
la nacionalidad y de la patria.”
 CHAPTER 6

Rufino Blanco Fombona: An Exile in Spain

Rufino Blanco Fombona, an arch critic of Juan Vicente Gómez who was
briefly a supporter of his when he took power from Cipriano Castro in
1908, would have nothing to do with the positivist visions of José Gil
Fortoul or Laureano Vallenilla Lanz. Throughout his career, this major
writer from the Venezuelan oligarchy who opted in the early 1890s for
military school rather than law school, the decision a sign of the times in a
country of sporadic insurrections where arms were more valuable than let-
ters, and who participated in the Revolución Legalista (The Legalist
Revolution) in 1892, the year after he entered the military academy, pre-
sented Bolívar as standing for the liberal Enlightenment principles his
rivals attacked.
Throughout his career, he served in a number of diplomatic positions:
in the 1890s under Joaquín Crespo, the victor in the 1892 civil war who
was president from 1892 to 1898, and previously an integral part of
Guzmán Blanco’s circle with different positions, including president of
the republic from 1884 to 1886; in the first decade of the new century
under Cipriano Castro, of whom he was first a supporter, then a critic,
calling for his removal, later a supporter again; and in French consular
offices in French cities during particular moments of his exile in Europe.
He was imprisoned twice, the first time during the Castro period for the
murder of a colonel who had been sent to arrest him when he was gover-
nor of the Federal Territory of the Amazon. His defense of indigenous
communities had sparked the ire of caucho (rubber) producers who

© The Author(s) 2020 155

R. T. Conn, Bolívar’s Afterlife in the Americas,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26218-1_6
156  R. T. CONN

denounced and pursued him. When the military got involved in the con-
frontation, seeking to detain him in Ciudad Bolívar—formerly Angostura—
to which he had escaped, he feared he would be assassinated. He was
eventually released, but then after taking to the streets to denounce Castro
and to promote a change in leadership, he found himself in prison again.
The reason was not his protest of Castro, but his protest of Castro’s suc-
cessor whom he briefly served. In his new position as secretary of the
Chamber of Deputies in Gómez’s government, he wrote a public letter
lambasting Gómez for calling upon US naval vessels in the moment of his
coup. Gómez was taking advantage of the fact that the United States had
wanted a change in government, Castro having been the reason for the
political situation that led to the European blockade in 1902–1903, and
one of the reasons for the creation of the corollary to the Monroe Doctrine
in 1904. Blanco Fombona agreed that Castro had to go but he did not
want US involvement. Gómez did not tolerate the criticism from this
already eminent individual whom he had wanted to resume service in the
Venezuelan diplomatic mission—where he could not intervene easily in
national politics. Released and sent into exile, Blanco Fombona found
himself first in Paris and then in Madrid, not returning to Venezuela until
after the Gómez era. In 1929, he was secretary general of the Paris-based
Junta Suprema de Liberación Nacional (Supreme Council of National
Liberation) that sought to take back the country after the Gómez repres-
sion of 1928. That effort, which included Venezuelan exiles from around
the world and was coordinated with caudillo generals in Venezuela, failed.
As Blanco Fombona moved from one space to the next in his career,
Bolívar was his passport, the credential he created and recreated.
In his 1902 essay, “La americanisación del mundo” (“The Americanization
of the World”), the title being the same as that of a book published in that
same year by the British writer W. T. Stead, Blanco Fombona from his con-
sular post in Holland called for Brazil and Spanish America to build diplo-
matic and cultural ties to guard against US incursions. He was responding
to Stead’s pronouncement, backed up by references to the pro-US reflec-
tions of the likes of the French thinker Alexis de Tocqueville, that the
United States would be the new political and cultural power of the twenti-
eth century, and to Stead’s proposal that Britain and she join forces to man-
age the globe. Bolívar had broken the colonies’ ties to Spain with his sword,
but now it was time for the region to use its common Spanish and Latin
heritage to build alliances, Blanco Fombona affirmed. But in terms of the
political developments that he would face, the seizure by the United States
 6  RUFINO BLANCO FOMBONA: AN EXILE IN SPAIN  157

of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines in 1898 and the immediate race-
and ethnic-based intellectual production it spawned in the Americas and
Europe were just the beginning for this figure who would not miss an
opportunity to defend his beliefs by polemizing. Through all the changes
in his life, he denounced US hegemony in Latin America. He pivoted to
defend Cipriano Castro, whom, as the historian Judith Ewell tells us, the
United States prevented from returning to Venezuela to mount a new revo-
lution, not letting Castro get any “closer to his homeland than Puerto
Rico, where he died in 1924.”1 For Blanco Fombona, Castro, whom he
had once thought corrupt, would be the leader who during his political
rule and long exile stood up to the United States.
La evolución política y social de Hispanoamérica (The Political and Social
Evolution of Spanish America), published in Madrid in 1911, was some-
thing of an opening salvo for the exiled writer who had already made a
name for himself not only as a fiction writer and poet (with one work
about his time in prison) but also as an editor and writer of prologues for
books.2 Here he narrates the history of the Spanish-American republics to
a Spanish audience that he is convinced has no respect for them, present-
ing the region in terms opposite to those of his positivist rivals. In his nar-
ratives there is no fragmentation to overcome, no anarchy to hold back,
no singular national evolution to hold to. He tells of a continent that is
European-descended, with whites who have mixed with non-white races—
a continent that with the exception of Puerto Rico and Cuba emerged
from its colonial situation in the nineteenth century and forged republics.
It was a region whose civil wars of that century were the result of the igno-
rance of the rural masses and the ease with which local individuals (chief-
tains or caciques, as he describes them, who take the form of military
leaders, ranchers, clerics, and teachers) abused them, and one in which the
European doctrine of positivism has been successfully championed, with
Latin American countries establishing models for economic growth in col-
laboration with European states. His Venezuelan rivals’ late-date instru-
mentalization of positivism was to be seen as a deviation in his story of
economic growth in Latin America writ large, falling outside history. As
for the world of letters, he ends the essay by explaining that the region has
produced the leading writers in the Spanish language.
The topic to which he draws the attention of his audience is Bolívar and
independence, the two major spaces in which he wages his never-ceasing
war with Gómez and the United States. He celebrates Spanish leaders and
soldiers, telling of their extraordinary success in defeating Napoleon in
158  R. T. CONN

Spain, then goes on to tell of the velour and ability of their Latin American
counterparts when they defeat those same forces in the northern part of
South America. As for independence, which he describes as a revolution,
he affirms that it also has a clear and knowable ideology. It is republican-
ism and democracy, as inspired by France’s 1789 Rights of Man; France
was the country where he was living. But in his quest to assign an ideology
to all of Latin America for the purpose of overcoming the visions of Gil
Fortoul and Vallenilla Lanz—the latter who in 1910 published the essay of
which we spoke in the last chapter, characterizing the country’s founding
fathers who wrote and approved the 1811 constitution as failing to under-
stand Venezuela’s entrenched primitive municipal tradition, the constitu-
tion of 1811 a fiction—the key moment, he explains, is the meeting
between Bolívar and San Martín at Guayaquil on July 26–27, 1822. The
constitutional monarchist, San Martín, vacates his military and political
command, leaving the project of completing independence to Bolívar and
to his political vision—republicanism and democracy. But he explains that
his ideological importance is not limited to Latin America. Europeans
should be thankful to Bolívar as well, as they are unknowing beneficiaries
of his legacy. Bolívar and others not only consolidated the principles of
democracy trampled by Napoleon, but also after Napoleon was defeated,
stood up to the Holy Alliance, which had taken hold in Europe and threat-
ened the Americas, with the newly restored Bourbons in the lead role.
Bolívar, he declares, resisted reactionary Europe, thus deserving of the
new title that he assigns him. He calls Bolívar the man of steel, a moniker
close to the one he had derisively bestowed on the main character in his
already popular novel of 1907, The Man of Iron (El hombre de hierro).
Bolívar was the person his fictional character was not.3
Conditions changed for Blanco Fombona when he took refuge in
Madrid in 1914, escaping the German invasion of Paris. In this new con-
text, he would have all the resources necessary to build a scholarly empire
in support of the Venezuela and Latin America he desired, thanks to the
publishing house he founded and directed, Editorial-América. Through
the books he himself edited, and the many he had published, some mem-
oirs and secondhand accounts of independence, as well as through his
own essayistic historical writing and fiction, he now framed Latin American
and peninsular history within the same ethical, racial, and linguistic con-
ceptual space. Spanish and Latin American intellectuals, including the
Mexican writer and scholar Alfonso Reyes with whom Blanco Fombona
collaborated soon after arriving in Spain, had like himself, for some time
 6  RUFINO BLANCO FOMBONA: AN EXILE IN SPAIN  159

been constructing intellectual frameworks tying together race, language,

and nation for their distinct state and hemispheric projects. In Spain there
were figures like Miguel de Unamuno; in Latin America, almost its entire
intelligentsia had been engaging in this manner ever since the political sea
change that was the US victory over Spain in 1898. In Venezuela, Vallenilla
Lanz was working within this framework but with a different politics and
disciplinary affiliation.
The writing of history was the central question for Blanco Fombona,
who like so many of his time believed that the institutionalization of the
correct history through print could define the political course. Bolívar
and independence were becoming an important center of historical
writing, as US and British intellectual production on Bolívar and inde-
pendence had increased in the first decades of the century, pushed in
the United States by the country’s new historians of the Americas, and
in the United Kingdom by the likes of H.  W. V. Temperley, who in
1905 published what is still considered the definitive biography of
George Canning. Canning was the figure who led Britain in its policy of
support for the new Latin American republics, foreign secretary, and
leader of the House of Commons between 1822 and 1827. Temperley,
with his rigorous scholarship in that book and work that followed,
shows a Canning who did not want the United Kingdom to relinquish
claims on Latin America, as the Monroe Doctrine prescribed for
European powers. As US scholars sang the praises of Monroe, Temperley
presented a nuanced explanation of Canning’s diplomatic maneuvering,
including Canning’s warning to France not to seek to reconquer the
now independent territories after it invaded Spain in the summer of
1823, and his success in having the United Kingdom recognize them
in 1826, during the brief period he was prime minister before illness
took his life.4
In the midst of increasing claims on his figure, Blanco Fombona, who
parsed through the many works on Bolívar and independence both from
his time and from the nineteenth century, indicating who was right and
who was wrong, now created a narrative about civilization and culture.
His aim was to blaze a path for a new vision of both the Venezuelan state
and the entire Hispanic world. That narrative would be fleshed out not
only in his historical essays but also in book prologues and editions. The
key essay is his 1920 book, El conquistador español del siglo xvi (The
Spanish Conqueror of the Sixteenth Century),5 a work that promised to
appeal to both his peninsular and Latin American publics. The time was
160  R. T. CONN

ripe for a new global vision lifting Latin America up in the way in which
he wanted. It was the end of the Great War and of the Mexican Revolution.
But the 1920s would go in a different direction both in Venezuela and in
Europe. The Italian fascist Benito Mussolini came to power in 1922, fol-
lowed by the Spanish General Miguel Primo de Rivera a year later. Gómez
became all the more powerful as he began to exploit Venezuela’s oil
reserves, supported by Blanco Fombona’s most formidable competitor,
Laureano Vallenilla Lanz, whose 1919 Democratic Caesarism was to
dominate discussion in the Venezuela of the 1920s, with Mussolini’s Italy
translating it.
The United States did not stop being a foe for him, this stance owing
to the country’s imperialism in Latin America and its alliance with Gómez.
For this reason, Blanco Fombona cites Bolívar’s words of 1829 stating
that the “United States seem destined by Providence to plague America
with miseries in the name of liberty.”6 He does not speak of James
Monroe’s recognition of the Spanish-American republics but instead,
inspired perhaps by the work of Temperley, focuses attention on the deci-
sion by the prime minister of the United Kingdom, George Canning, to
do so. Bolívar is the linchpin in the process of modernization, the figure
who helped to bring capitalism, republicanism, and liberal nationalism to
Latin America and who, in doing so, ushered not only the Hispanic world,
but also, he asserts, the world in its entirety into modernity. As a thinker,
Bolívar, we are told, receives his influences from the French Enlightenment
and the United Kingdom. There is no mention of the United States. As a
military leader, he unconsciously receives them through his Spanish racial
heritage—he is something of a latter-day conquistador, a figure with tre-
mendous zeal and imagination who improvised just as the conquis-
tadors did.
But if Bolívar was a heroic military leader—descended from conquista-
dors, as Blanco Fombona was fond of saying his illustrious family was—he
was also violent, though no more so than the Spanish and their royalist breth-
ren, Blanco Fombona asserts. In his 1911 essay, “La evolución política y
social de Hispanoamérica” (“The Political and Social Evolution of Spanish
America”) he speaks of the cruelty of royalist and independentist leaders alike.
His 1920 book, El conquistador español del siglo xvi (The Spanish Conqueror
of the Sixteenth Century) creates a long narrative to make that same statement
again, only now in the more powerful terms of a story about culture and civi-
lization that is shared on both sides of the Atlantic. In that story, we see
Spanish culture as being unforgiving and hard, with the result that in the
wars of independence both Spaniards and independentist military leaders act
 6  RUFINO BLANCO FOMBONA: AN EXILE IN SPAIN  161

barbarically. Blanco Fombona is conflating discursive spaces in both Spain

and in the Americas constructed around the War to the Death, presenting the
violence of the period of 1813 to 1814 (though Lynch extends it to 1820 to
include Santander’s execution of captive Spanish officers) as resulting from a
tradition going back centuries in the context of colonialism and encompass-
ing both Spain and Latin America. Spaniards cannot sit in judgment of Bolívar.
There are other criticisms that he also seeks to both recognize and neu-
tralize in the context of his national and international politics. On the
topic of Bolívar the state builder, Blanco Fombona makes a point of not
endorsing this iteration of Bolívar’s figure, explaining that the Gran
Colombia was a military construct. On the topic of the Cúcuta Constitution,
he does not allow Bolívar to receive any credit for it, stating that his own
ideas presented in the Angostura Address were rejected. With this, Blanco
Fombona also leaves aside the Bolivian Constitution, only stating that this
was one more document that the brilliant Bolívar produced and that inge-
niously merged together constitutional monarchy and democracy. The
political framework of Latin America’s new republics was not to be found
in the ideas of Bolívar, but neither was it to be found in those of figures
such as Santander and Flores who rejected Bolívar’s vision of a large state.
Blanco Fombona’s discussion of old and new colonialisms in El con-
quistador español del siglo xvi is fascinating and the constant in his reflec-
tion on culture and civilization is how Spain after the reconquest of 1492,
with the defeat of the Moors, the expulsion of the Jews, and Columbus’s
so-called discovery of the New World, turned away from values related to
commerce and culture to embrace, through the monarchs, Christian val-
ues that said no to economic development. The results over the decades,
and then with the arrival of the Habsburgs (1516–1700) and the Bourbons
(1700–1808), were a bad economic policy that did not allow the colonies
to be productive in the new industries, the impoverishment of the people,
and the coming into being of a dubious work ethic.
But Blanco Fombona is also concerned with redefining Spanish cultural
nationalism, such as to connect it to the field of Latin American
letters, imagining Latin American Hispano-Europeos and Español-­
Latinoamericanos as occupying one and the same cultural universe
through a common heritage based also on a similar understanding of the
role of Spanish-American independence. To build such an understanding,
he battles the Spanish press, targeting an article in La Tribuna (The
Tribune) written in 1920 on the occasion of the 100-year anniversary of
the Spanish liberal movement of 1820, the same year in which he brought
162  R. T. CONN

out El conquistador español del siglo xvi. The article proposes that Spanish
battalions’ refusal to go to the Americas to fight was the reason Latin
America independence was won. Blanco Fombona, who writes on the
topic in his 1911 and 1920 works, lambasts its conservative author, Julio
Cejador, accusing him of divesting the Latin American nations of their
status as authors of one of the great achievements of the modern world.
Latin American independence, as Blanco Fombona states, was achieved
after years of struggle and sacrifice, the turning point not when Major
Rafael de Riego refused orders to take his troops to the Americas, but the
moment that same year that farmworkers broke with their centuries-old
allegiance to Spain and aligned themselves with the elites. This was a dif-
ferent explanation than the one he offers in his 1911 essay, where he
describes the turning point as the moment when Venezuelan royalist sol-
diers and battalions such as Numancia changed sides. He cast the formula-
tion in aggressively classist terms, presenting independence as if it were
one single process, though in truth the timeline he is using is that of the
war in northern South America:

Half of America, the ignorant part, the masses of farmworkers, supported

Spain; and by the thousands, not hundreds, are to be counted the Spanish
components—and European of all kinds: English, French, German—which
defended with their weapons in hand the cause of América. The war lasted
until the humble classes and those of the countryside, I repeat, became con-
vinced that it was no longer in their interest to support the foreign
monarchy.7

Who were these farmworkers defined pejoratively in terms of their

alleged lack of knowledge? Who were the humble classes? Blanco Fombona,
who is now taking on Vallenilla Lanz’s 1919 Cesarismo democrático, is
constructing a new social subject through which to narrate the ideologi-
cally fraught agrarian world of Venezuela, one that can take the place of the
subject position, both real and discursive, constituted by the llaneros
(plainsmen), who were rallied first by Boves to serve Spain in his defeat of
the Second Republic, and then by Páez to serve the cause of independence,
and later, according to Vallenilla Lanz, as the core of the troops surround-
ing Páez when he was president. It was a collectivity that John Lynch
describes as mostly unsatisfied in mid-1821 when they were “put on indefi-
nite unpaid leave,” with “robbery and unrest” occurring in the Apure as
“successful landowners began to organize and extend their interests,”
 6  RUFINO BLANCO FOMBONA: AN EXILE IN SPAIN  163

expanding in Vallenilla Lanz’s positivist hands into violent and criminal

masses willing to be used for any of the national causes.8
Blanco Fombona tells a different story than the one told by Vallenilla
Lanz, who not only makes the llaneros into a synecdoche for a civic body
that cannot adapt to liberalism, existing as such through the Guerra
Federal and beyond, but also proclaims that the battle for independence,
that he describes as a civil war, only comes to an end when there are no
more bodies in Venezuelan territory to fight, the material for violence
being used up momentarily. In contrast, Blanco Fombona imagines the
agrarian world in Enlightenment terms with emphasis on the matter of
education, the discursive space to which he repeatedly returns, as do so
many Venezuelan actors. In his case, the terms are those of a white edu-
cated elite that teaches and non-white masses who learn. Affirming that
their political participation is essential to the success of independence, he
describes these so-called ignorant farmers as finally aligning themselves
with independentist elites who are also international in character, includ-
ing among them the 7000 soldiers who travel to serve under Bolívar after
the Napoleonic Wars. To be sure, in this act of reconstructing Bolívar and
the epic of independence, Blanco Fombona is building a top-down liberal
politics based on the idea of a social body that is capable of using its reason
to change allegiances, a social body that can learn and that will follow the
creole elites. It is a vision that stands in contrast to that of Vallenilla Lanz
for whom the people are unruly, requiring the leadership of a strongman.
Blanco Fombona fights populism with a new version of classism or uplift.
His first act upon returning to Venezuela will be to establish a school.
In his narrative that brings Spain and Latin America together, that
privileges Latin America as the key to global modernity, and that con-
structs the idea of an educated creole elite standing above a citizenry
defined in terms of its purported need to learn from those above, or to
learn on its own what those above already know, Blanco Fombona also
promotes the figure of Spanish General Pablo Morillo, not only by bring-
ing out a work about him at his editorial house in 1916, but also by writ-
ing the book’s prologue.9 Blanco Fombona explains that one of the
reasons for the publication is the fact that Spanish military leaders are not
known to Spaniards. But he also gives additional reasons for the publica-
tion, justifications having to do with his politics of reconciliation within
the history of culture and civilization he is constructing. He explains that
Morillo embodies Spanish popular values and that the true antagonists of
Morillo are not the Spanish Americans he fights against from 1815 to
164  R. T. CONN

1821, but the French.10 A champion of the Spanish people, Morillo hero-
ically defends Spain, not relenting until he and others drive out the
Napoleonic forces in 1813. Furthermore, Blanco Fombona contrasts him
with Fernando VII, whom he portrays as the enemy of his people, said
not to have been sequestered by Napoleon but to have taken refuge with
him; they are allies. As for the particulars of the counter-revolution led by
Morillo, he continues to reverse the terms of the standard portrayal.
Morillo is, indeed, as Blanco Fombona tells us, the attack dog of Fernando
VII, just as historians have said; but he is also a professional soldier who
simply executes his orders. Morillo’s much-cited words “Spain does not
need wise people,” pronounced in the moment the Spanish commander
orders the execution of the scientist Francisco José de Caldas on October
28, 1816, in New Granada, do not tell the full story of who he was. In
Blanco Fombona’s hands, Morillo represents not the barbaric will of
Spain to hold on to its empire but the Spanish drive for democratic ideals
in addition to the professional soldier. With this, he ends the prologue by
stating that he has attempted to make real the spirit of Caracas’s bronze
statue representing the famous embrace of Morillo and Bolívar in an
Andean village in 1820.11
In this process of turning Spanish intellectual models and the history of
the Americas upside down to define a cross-Atlantic democratic Hispanic
subjectivity distinct from but drawing on the traditions of the French and
the English, Blanco Fombona resurrects the figure of Felipe Larrazábal,
republishing his two tomes while explaining that this intellectual of the
Liberal Party was wrong in his portrayal of Spanish generals—they were
not all cruel—and that he was equally wrong in his characterization of
Spanish men in their relationship with women—they do not mistreat
them. Blanco Fombona used his press to reveal many memoirs and sec-
ondhand accounts of the military figures of independence. On the subject
of the veracity of Larrazábal’s letters, he states that he has cross-referenced
them with other volumes of Bolívar’s correspondence and determined
that they are authentic. But also he finds Larrazábal’s narrative framework
to be inadequate in comparison to the one he is creating. Larrazábal fails
to place Bolívar at the forefront of hemispheric history and what he calls
Christian, universal history. Spain, though decadent, brought Roman
Christian civilization to the hemisphere, colonizing what he calls the bar-
baric indigenous, but it became corrupt. Bolívar re-energizes that civiliza-
tion by offering the promise of modernity.
 6  RUFINO BLANCO FOMBONA: AN EXILE IN SPAIN  165

Blanco Fombona also resurrects Daniel Florencio O’Leary—O’Leary

like Larrazábal an important discursive site—republishing his Memorias in
order to show that Bolívar never veered from his commitment to
Enlightenment and republican values. Unrelenting in his desire to pro-
mote and reshape the texts through which Bolívar is known, he states that
Daniel Florencio O’Leary and the Venezuelan state of Guzmán Blanco
missed an opportunity to do justice to Bolívar’s figure. First, both actors
failed to organize the Memorias with proper narrative breaks and headings
to facilitate reading. Blanco Fombona, who constructs his own historical
narrative in this way, that is, dividing it into easily consumable sections
with a header or subtitle to guide the reader, made this editorial change.
Second, the Venezuelan state had failed to have the volumes translated
into English, something that would have gone a long way to guard against
erroneous views of his figure in the United States. In addition, he brought
out Gran Colombia y España (1819–1822), a book excerpting letters from
the correspondence assembled by O’Leary, his goal being to show the
cross-Atlantic connections in the new Hispanic epic he constructs, partic-
ularly in these years when Spain was governed by the Cortes.12
Finally, Blanco Fombona reimagines Bolívar yet again when he returns
to Venezuela after the death of Gómez. Education, as it always has been
for him, is the answer to the challenges to liberal ideology. In 1942, he
brought out two works in Buenos Aires, where he had gone to have his
earlier writings republished. He would die there in 1944. Both volumes
center on Rousseau and his Émile.
In his 1942 Mocedades de Bolívar (The Youthful Deeds of Bolívar), Blanco
Fombona follows Bolívar’s education in the first two decades of his life
while he also recreates Venezuelan history.13 The title is a play on the early
seventeenth-century play by Guillén de Castro, which draws on the medi-
eval ballad tradition about the youthful exploits of the medieval hero, El
Cid—knowledge Blanco Fombona would have had through his relation-
ships with Spain’s famous scholars of medieval and early modern Spanish
literature at Madrid’s Centro de Estudios Históricos (Center of Historical
Studies) established in 1914. Intending it for both a juvenile and an adult
audience, with this book he re-establishes the Venezuelan oligarchy of the
colonial period as the protagonists of independence, presents Bolívar as the
caudillo who stands for democracy and republicanism, and celebrates the
importance of education by using the Simón Rodríguez-­Bolívar dyad;
Bolívar learns Rousseau’s lesson of living freely so well that he becomes the
Liberator.14 He conveys a number of educational principles, including that
166  R. T. CONN

children should study hard and that they should understand that the pur-
pose of education is to promote freedom. On the subject of the long-­
attacked oligarchy of which he forms part, he explains that the upper-class
creoles to whom Bolívar belongs—the so-called mantuanos—are the patri-
cians of colonial society who carry out a democratic and egalitarian revolu-
tion that is completed by the end of 1825.
Blanco Fombona’s description of the revolution is important. Now,
without Spanish interlocutors with whom he need concern himself, he
dramatizes the conflict between the Spanish and creoles by speaking of
the War to the Death differently. Blanco Fombona presents the figure of
Tomás Boves as someone decimating Venezuelan whites. That could seem
a terrible event. But in the story Blanco Fombona recounts, the result is
that the racist society of the past is no more, with violence having per-
formed a cleansing or leveling function, washing away the historic elite
that produced the country’s casta system and bringing into being a soci-
ety that can embrace modernity. In a discursive world in which the cate-
gory of violence is so important, used in so many different ways for
distinct projects, Blanco Fombona is once again making the category his
own by telling his readers how to understand its meaning. The political
philosophy of the eighteenth century, the mantuanos and Caracas have
performed their respective roles in making possible the new Venezuela.
The ruins of the Caracas of 1825 are the proof of an old order that was
sacrificed in order to bring into being one that was new, with mantuanos
leading the way but largely disappearing as a social-political class. Still,
Venezuela must remain true to the heroic sacrifice made and to the 1811
constitution.
Interestingly, Blanco Fombona continues to find in the Bolívar/
Napoleon dyad fruitful material. It is no longer a matter of Bolívar resist-
ing Napoleon or the Holy Alliance, though. Now Blanco Fombona pres-
ents the two as parallel figures, stating that what they have in common is
that they both came from parts far away from the metropolitan center of
the empires in which they lived and that they both embraced democracy
early in their lives. Napoleon, however, betrays the new ideology by mak-
ing himself emperor; Bolívar remains true to it by refusing to accept a
crown from Venezuelans and Europeans. The title of the Liberator is suf-
ficient for him.
As for the exact comparison he makes between Bolívar and Rousseau,
Blanco Fombona speaks of Bolívar as a philosopher or political thinker
who has gone beyond Rousseau. In the prologue to his new 1942 edition
 6  RUFINO BLANCO FOMBONA: AN EXILE IN SPAIN  167

of Bolívar writings, El pensamiento vivo de Bolívar (The Living Thought of

Bolívar), he opposes the adult Bolívar to Rousseau, describing the latter as
a critic of European decadence and the former as Latin America’s first
modern figure. Rousseau, whom Bolívar read when he was a student of
Simón Rodríguez, is a quaint, naive thinker, appropriate for the opening
of young minds but nothing more. Bolívar has gone beyond Rousseau.
For, unlike Rousseau, the adult Bolívar does not idealize man in his natu-
ral, primitive state, and furthermore, does not believe that small republics
with direct democracies are the ideal political form. More sophisticated
and realistic, he believes that the future belongs to large states defined by
indirect democracy and that education must be at the center of society.15
Blanco Fombona is seeking to steer Venezuela toward a liberal democracy.
Bolívar, he asserts, wanted states in which voting was done by ballot and
in secret.
But there is more. Mocedades de Bolívar is, in a sense, Blanco Fombona’s
culminating work, an historical narrative in which he reconstructs not only
an illustrious genealogy for the creole class, but also in the footnotes of the
text, a lineage for his own family that is to stand for that of the nation. This
other genealogy recounts the family’s centuries-long love for liberty and
its decades-long struggle, first with Guzmán Blanco, then with Gómez.16
In one footnote, Blanco Fombona remembers what Gómez and his police
stole from him when he was exiled in 1910—invaluable family heirlooms
of the nineteenth century passed down from grandparents and uncles and
aunts, including letters from the Ecuadorian Liberal writer Juan Montalvo
and a silverware plate belonging to Bolívar.17 Forget Vallenilla Lanz’s story
of biological and cultural inheritances that make the nation ungovernable
by the elites. And forget also Gil Fortoul’s new 1930 vision of a Bolívar
who would have been the ideal illiberal caudillo leader of Venezuela that
we will soon discuss. In the genealogy of the Blanco Fombona family that
Mocedades de Bolívar provides, we find leaders who defended liberty at any
cost. For Blanco Fombona, those family members, together with him,
constitute the tradition of the intellectuals and the citizens who con-
front power.
The young aristocrat Bolívar is a version of himself. In 1799, en route
to Spain from Caracas with a stopover in Veracruz, Bolívar, in a meeting
arranged through family connections with none other than the viceroy,
boldly spoke of independence. Rousseau was running through the veins of
the privileged Caracas native, just as the Genevan thinker had once influ-
enced the young Blanco Fombona. With this, we are to understand the
168  R. T. CONN

history of Venezuela not as that of unruly masses requiring the leadership

of a personalistic authoritarian leader, but intellectuals and leaders from
the white elites brave enough to take on despots, and to speak of educat-
ing the population rather than using that population’s purported under-
development or state of unlawfulness to argue against the appropriateness
of constitutionalism. But Blanco Fombona’s vision of a new Venezuela
rooted in its 1811 constitutional tradition and in the intellectual who con-
fronts authoritarian power would be difficult to keep in view, eclipsed by
both the classist and racist spirit sometimes animating his education proj-
ect and by his portrayal of himself and his family as representing, from the
position of the old oligarchy, the country’s liberal and modern spirit. Nor
do his shamelessly racist, ethnic barbs that he directs against others, includ-
ing, absurdly, the Argentine historian Bartolomé Mitre with whose por-
trayal of Bolívar he did not agree, make it easy for his work to be understood
in the racial politics of his times—a form of politics in which defending
creoles or the oligarchy was to attack Gómez’s ideologues.

Notes
1. Judith Ewell, Venezuela and the United States: From Monroe’s Hemisphere
to Petroleum’s Empire (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), 114.
2. Rufino Blanco Fombona, Rufino Blanco Fombona: ensayos históricos
(Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1992). (La evolución política y social de
Hispanoamérica, 1911: 153–194).
3. Ibid., 178.
4. H. W. V. Temperley, Life of Canning (London: J. Finch & Co., 1905).
5. Rufino Blanco Fombona, El conquistador español del siglo xvi (Madrid:
Ediciones Nuestra Raza, 1920).
6. “Los Estados Unidos parecen destinados a plagar América de miseria en
nombre de la libertad.” From a letter to Patricio Campbell written in
Guayaquil on August 5, 1829.
7. Rufino Blanco Fombona, 1992, Rufino Blanco Fombona: ensayos históricos
(Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho), 197. From articles collected in La Espada
de Samuray (Madrid: Editorial Mundo Latino, 1924). “La mitad de
América, la parte ignorante, las masas de labriegos, apoyaban a España; y
por millares, no por centenas, se cuentan los elementos españoles—y
europeos de todas suerte: ingleses, franceses, alemanes—que sostuvieron
con las armas en la mano la causa de América. La guerra duró hasta que los
americanos de las clases humildes y campesinas, repito, se convencieron de
que no convenía continuar sosteniendo a la monarqúia extranjera.”
 6  RUFINO BLANCO FOMBONA: AN EXILE IN SPAIN  169

8. John Lynch, 1986, The Spanish American Revolutions, 1808–1826 (N.Y.:

W. W. Norton and Co.), 223.
9. Rafael Sevilla, 1916, Memorias de un oficial del ejército español; campañas con-
tra Bolívar y los separatistas de América. Apreciación de la obra, por R. Blanco
Fombona (Madrid: Editorial-América, Biblioteca Ayacucho series).
10. Rufino Blanco Fombona, Rufino Blanco Fombona: ensayos históricos
(Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho 1992), 432.
11. Rafael Sevilla, Memorias de un oficial del ejército español; campañas contra
Bolívar y los separatistas de América. Apreciación de la obra, por R.  Blanco
Fombona (Madrid: Editorial-América, Biblioteca Ayacucho series 1916), 15.
12. Daniel F. O’Leary, Notas de R. Blanco Fombona (Biblioteca de la juven-
tud hispano-americana), Gran Colombia y España (1819–1822) (Madrid:
Editorial-America, 1919).
13. This is my translation. The book was not translated into English. Rufino
Blanco Fombona, Mocedades de Bólivar (Caracas: Ministerio de Educación,
1969).
14. Ibid., 87.
15. Rufino Blanco Fombona, El pensamiento vivo de Bolívar (Buenos Aires:
Editorial Losada, 1983), 9–10; 18–19.
16. Rufino Blanco Fombona, Mocedades de Bólivar (Caracas: Ministerio de
Educación, 1969), 50–51.
17. Ibid., 42.
 CHAPTER 7

The Construction of a Patrician Heritage

and of Calumny: Vicente Lecuna, La Casa
Natal, El Archivo del Libertador,
and the Bolivarian Society

The case of Vicente Lecuna is central to the story of Bolívar in Venezuela’s

public sphere. Like Blanco Fombona, Lecuna had before him a political
tradition defined by the fact of the dictatorship of Gómez as well as by Gil
Fortoul and Vallenilla Lanz, both of whom promoted authoritarian gov-
ernment, though differently. But Lecuna, who supported republican gov-
ernment and had his own experience on the military and political
battlefield, did not follow the path of a Blanco Fombona, a Larrazábal, or
a Nicanor Bolet Peraza. Becoming the symbol of a new conservativism,
Lecuna quietly defended his ideas, determined to change the country
from within through what he saw as his contributions as a citizen, a civil-
ian, rather than a governmental official. His vision of liberalism was cer-
tainly different from that of the three intellectuals named, but for exiles he
would be an ally.
One after another, he accepted appointments for the direction of new
and old institutional sites in Venezuela. They included the Escuela de
Artes y Oficios (the School of Arts and Trades) in 1911; the Bank of
Venezuela in 1915, appointed by the bank’s shareholders; also in 1915, El
Archivo del Libertador (the Archive of the Liberator), which he was tasked
with organizing; and in 1916, the Casa Natal (Birthplace) of Bolívar, the
old Bolívar homestead right off the Bolívar Plaza in the center of Caracas
that in 1912 was purchased by the Sociedad Patriótica (the Patriotic

© The Author(s) 2020 171

R. T. Conn, Bolívar’s Afterlife in the Americas,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26218-1_7
172  R. T. CONN

Society) and donated to the state. A trained engineer who had worked on
the construction of the railroad in the 1890s and who in later decades
proposed that it be extended into the llanos (southern plains), Lecuna was
a semi-governmental actor and modernizer. Under his direction, the Bank
of Venezuela, which had been in crisis, and the Casa Natal, became highly
significant in their respective spheres: finance and state culture. Not an
owner of property, not a businessperson, Lecuna built up what he saw as
public capital. He would be the opposite of Manuel Antonio Matos (the
high finance banker of whom we have spoken) who was the treasury min-
ister three times and president of the senate and congress. The values
Lecuna understood himself to embody were virtue, honesty, and methodi-
cal and rigorous thinking in the context of the defense of the idea of a
national culture. They were positivist values, coming down from the work
of French thinkers like Ernest Renan, who equated society with the
invented concept of a nation’s people: for Renan the French race, for
those who took over the concept, the Spanish, the Italian, the Latin, and
so on. Lecuna used these values as the basis for a new Venezuela with
institutions that would serve and shape the public.
Lecuna had seen the worst of Venezuelan politics. He fought under
Juan Manuel (El Mocho) Hernández in 1897, when Hernández sought to
take Caracas by force after Joaquín Crespo stole the elections from him. In
addition to the death of Crespo, Lecuna witnessed Hernández lose in bat-
tle and be placed in prison, but negotiate to have Lecuna and others under
him go free. He also saw Hernández, after his release in 1902, support
Cipriano Castro in the Revolución Libertadora (Liberating Revolution),
1901–1903, then become a member of his cabinet. But his support did
not last for long. Within days of the start of Castro’s post-war govern-
ment, Hernández mounted an insurrection against him because he dis-
agreed with his policies. On the subject of federalism in the 1890s, Lecuna
was critical of Liberal caudillos who amassed fortunes for themselves with-
out contributing to the state. Manuel Antonio Matos controlled the
National Treasury in 1899.
In what was another kind of positivism, one defined not only by the con-
servative nation thinking of the nineteenth century, but also by philology—
the academic practice of text preparation, ordering, and accumulation that
also became important in the nineteenth century—Lecuna took possession
of the written legacy in a definitive manner. In 1920, he moved the Archivo
del Libertador to the Casa Natal, which he had had renovated. He was
reconstituting that space so that it could function as a house museum or
 7  THE CONSTRUCTION OF A PATRICIAN HERITAGE AND OF CALUMNY…  173

historic home, that of Bolívar, of the Bolívar family, and of an historical

period. Through it—and not the massive slave plantation the Bolívars had
once owned or something resembling it—he domesticated Venezuelan his-
tory, to use the critical language of Patricia West, author of Domesticating
history: the political origins of America’s house museums.1
With the Casa Natal and the Archivo del Libertador together, Lecuna
established the contours of a new social history based on the concepts of
preservation and authenticity. That social history, which was both paperless
and textual, was that of Venezuela’s wealthy whites, the mantuanos, of
which Bolívar had been one. Opposed to the histories of Vallenilla Lanz and
Gil Fortoul, it re-figured the members of that racial aristocracy as a patriotic
patrician class that was still relevant for the nation, erasing from view their
place as slaveholders and creators of a society based on hierarchical racial
groupings. From the perspective of a nation modernizing, Lecuna gave
Venezuelans a new beginning to look back upon with pride and nostalgia.
As part of this heritage project, Lecuna commissioned Tito Salas to
paint frescoes of scenes from independence on the interior walls of the
Casa Natal and of the buildings of the government. In the Casa Natal,
where he began in 1919, Salas painted Bolívar’s epic story, including his
ascent in 1822 of the Chimborazo, southwest of Quito, immortalized by
Bolívar’s poem “Mi delirio sobre el Chimborazo” (“My Delirium atop the
Chimborazo”). For some, the veracity of the ascent and the poem has
never been proven. Lecuna and Salas also included the scene of the signing
of the 1811 constitution, the constitution that Bolívar denounced. He was
unmistakably defending Venezuela’s constitutional tradition and creole
past with whiteness a place of subjectivity for a modernizing Venezuela
that would bring more than a million immigrants from Europe in the
decade of the 1950s—the nineteenth-century wave of immigration the
country had never had and that many in the elites had longed for.
Venezuela’s elites would no longer be defined by region or political party
but by an invented racial and cultural genealogy covering over the civil
wars and military insurrections of the nineteenth and early twentieth cen-
turies. It was a vision that ultimately would prevail, consumed by both the
national and international public. Photographic images of Tito Salas’s
frescoes appeared in the bulletin of the Pan American Union in the United
States in the 1920s and also in the bulletin Lecuna would found.
In one of his great publishing feats in his career, Lecuna brought out
in a ten-volume collection commissioned by Juan Vicente Gómez the
documents in the Archivo del Libertador, with the first volumes appearing
174  R. T. CONN

in 1929 and 1930, right at the moment of the hemispheric centenary cel-
ebrations of Bolívar’s death and of the centenary of the beginning of the
Venezuelan republic. (Lecuna had already published in 1920 his Papeles de
Bolívar (Papers of Bolívar) at Blanco Fombona’s Editorial-América in
Madrid.)2 He methodically numbered the letters and named the corre-
spondents. The publication was a literary event, a heritage in the making.
They were volumes to own and display.
The state was celebrating 1830. In the formulation of the Gómez admin-
istration, Venezuelan independence from the Gran Colombia in this year
was an act of refounding of the First Republic (1811–1812), not a brand
new beginning. Lecuna was not the only scholar to produce tomes of a
monumental nature at this moment. So did Gil Fortoul, who re-published
his work, Historia constitucional de Venezuela of 1907 and 1909. But Gil
Fortoul’s volumes were not an updated version, but a work with new theo-
retical principles that organized it. Aligning himself more closely to Vallenilla
Lanz, Gil Fortoul uses a new race-based vision of positivism to tell the his-
tory of Venezuela from its indigenous beginnings to the present. In the
original volumes, he had spoken of race in his discussion of colonial
Venezuela and in his discussion of the racial groups during the period of
independence. This, then, is hardly the future edition hoped for by Hiram
Bingham, one with extensive notes to reflect the source work, but tomes
that tell the history of Venezuela from the perspective of the Gómez state.
Assigning Bolívar a philosophy in the new age of national ideology and the
critique of liberalism that was the 1920s, defined as such by Lenin (Soviet
Union), Mussolini (Italy), Paco de Rivera (Spain), and, yes, Vallenilla Lanz
(Venezuela), Gil Fortoul speaks of him as a figure who believed that only by
his own action could independence be achieved. Gil Fortoul purposefully
chooses the word “believe” to signify the power and simplicity of Bolívar’s
ideology, which was his self. Ideology, after all, is a belief. It is the belief that
Bolívar had in his mission, which is so strong for him that he cannot submit
to the actions of congresses, such as the 1821 Cúcuta Constitution that
privileged the legislative branch and that was, Gil Fortoul reminds us, not
of Bolívar’s making. In addition to portraying a Bolívar with little respect
for congresses, he also moves him from the stage of hemispheric gover-
nance to that of national. He revises his own narrative of the Gran Colombia,
underlining Bolívar’s political acuity on the subject of the future of his state,
which includes his understanding, already visible in the early 1820s, that
the Gran Colombia will not last and that the real challenge for Latin
America is not defeating the Spanish but creating successful independent
states. Emphasizing that Bolívar is Venezuelan, Gil Fortoul offers that
Bolívar would have been eminently successful as the Venezuelan head of
 7  THE CONSTRUCTION OF A PATRICIAN HERITAGE AND OF CALUMNY…  175

state had he elected not to create a large state or go south. The perfect
national leader, he would have carried out the contemporary positivist proj-
ect. For Bolívar’s political vision, Gil Fortoul states, was always that of a
constitutional monarchy, but with himself not as king, rather as perpetual
or lifetime leader. Gil Fortoul holds on to Bolívar’s Bolivian Constitution in
this way, but he is drawing closer to Vallenilla Lanz’s notion of the constitu-
tion as a non-constitution that legitimizes the personalistic leader. He had
not insisted on the president for life in the original 1907 volume, though
he had suggested it as a solution to the nineteenth-century reality of
Venezuelan executives seeking and securing extended terms. The Bolivian
constitution would give a constitutional form to that reality.
In his new effort to reconstruct Bolívar in the strict positivist space of
the nation, Gil Fortoul finds ironies in Venezuelan state formation, ironies
that show that Bolívar’s philosophy is in fact the one that succeeded. In
this way, he creates a new space in which to represent continuity between
his figure and the Venezuelan state.
The Congress of Valencia in 1830 accused Bolívar of betraying the 1811
constitution. But it, too, Gil Fortoul states, betrayed the revered founda-
tional charter, adapting the constitution to the needs of the oligarchy, just as
Bolívar had adapted it to his authoritarian political vision. First, the congress
centralized the state; second, it created voter restrictions. Bolívar was right
when he said no to federalism in 1812 and later when he created constitu-
tions that were executive-centered with a lifetime president.3 Unconsciously,
the drafters of the 1830 constitution were affirming what Bolívar had first
perceived, the insufficiency of the 1811 constitution and the need to revise it.
Indeed, this is not the Gran Colombia that comes to an end amid the
political confusion caused by Bolívar’s physical and mental decline and
realization that it is not viable, replaced by the Venezuelan state. Rather
it is a Gran Colombia that has no foundational value, different in its
constitutional form from that called for in Bolívar’s Angostura Address
and Bolivian Constitution. In the final years of the Gran Colombia when
Bolívar was defending it, he was no longer, we are told, the true Bolívar,
having descended into a kind of decadence. The cause is not that in his
weakened physical state he had been led astray by advisors, as Gil Fortoul
said in 1907, but that he was unable to accept that the only practical
reality for Latin America is the nation state. The fact that order in the
different territories of the Gran Colombia depends on the presence of
his person, that in his absence they fall into anarchy or secede, is proof
that his grandiose impulses, which allowed him to liberate the continent,
now prevented him from seeing the facts on the ground. Those facts on
the ground are the nation state as defined by positivism’s linkage of race,
176  R. T. CONN

the economy, and the state in the context of a teleological vision of his-
tory. With regard to race, Gil Fortoul announces that the future of
Venezuela belongs from the time of independence forward to mestizo
Venezuelans, the whites in the colonial period unproductive, having
lived off their estates. By mestizo, Gil Fortoul means people who are a
mixture not only of white and indigenous ancestry, but also of African.
He is perhaps adapting the category from the Mexican intellectual José
Vasconcelos’s race theory essay of 1925, “La raza cósmica” (“The
Cosmic Race”). But for Venezuela to progress, a wholesale reconstruc-
tion of the economy via capitalism must take place before republicanism
can be contemplated.4
Here were two major works with different ideological visions. Gil
Fortoul had done nothing less than rewrite his classic history to justify
authoritarian rule in his country as well as in Latin America to Venezuelans
and the world. But the centenary celebration of 1930, in Venezuela, was
fraught politically. It occurred right on the heels of the 1928 protest
against Gómez by Venezuelan students and intellectuals and the crack-
down that immediately followed, with many either going into hiding,
being imprisoned, killed, or fleeing the country, and immediately after the
attempted military invasion by exiles for whom the repression was the last
straw. Those imprisoned served their terms in La Rotunda, most not gain-
ing release until the death of Gómez in 1935. Among those who escaped
imprisonment, going into exile, was a young Rómulo Betancourt, the
same figure who in the decades ahead served twice as president of
Venezuela and who in so doing was locked in battle with the military
leader Marcos Pérez Jiménez. The individuals of different ages who were
victims of the repression would be known as Venezuela’s Generación del
28 (Generation of 1928). They could not have looked kindly on Gil
Fortoul as they wallowed in their jail cells and struggled to make their way
in exile. In his history as well as in that of Vallenilla Lanz, they were either
offshoots of an extinct social class whose republican institutions did not
serve the nation or so many threads of a collective racial formation in the
making that only the state could name. Gil Fortoul brought out additional
editions of his Historia constitucional de Venezuela after the death of
Gómez, editions in which he sought to explain himself. He had been
defining history. Now he was trying to keep up with it.
In 1950, Lecuna had occasion to have an exchange with the distin-
guished general who in response to the repression mounted a military
insurrection in 1929 in coordination with Venezuelan exiles, the Paris-
based Junta Suprema de Liberación Nacional (Supreme Council of
 7  THE CONSTRUCTION OF A PATRICIAN HERITAGE AND OF CALUMNY…  177

National Liberation) of which Rufino Blanco Fombona was secretary. This

was General José Rafael Gabaldón Iragory, who lost to Gómez’s military
after battling for two months and who then spent two years in prison. His
son, historian Joaquín Gabaldón Márquez, when honoring Lecuna in
1970, 16 years after his death, tells of several episodes in his life, including
an exchange of letters between Lecuna and Gabaldón Iragory.
Lecuna had received from the father a letter thanking him for his new
three-volume history of Bolívar that he had sent to him at his estate as a
gift. Gabaldón Iragory told of how much he enjoyed the volumes, praising
its author as the country’s brilliant historian of Bolívar and a man of impec-
cable character. Lecuna wrote back, saying that he wished the father had
been able to influence the course of Venezuelan history. He also reflects
on the arbitrariness of power and leadership:

To rise to power, talent and virtue are not sufficient. Favorable circum-
stances that do not always benefit the most worthy or the most useful are
necessary. This is what history teaches and we ought to resign ourselves to
that fact. The ancients represented fortune as blind.5

In addition, the son tells of the events of 1929, of how Lecuna coura-
geously supported his father after he learned that his own name, Vicente
Lecuna, had appeared on a list of honorable and respectable men who
could vouch for his character. Gabaldón Iragory had included the list in a
letter he sent to Gómez in the moment of his decision to surrender, under-
standing that he had no chance to prevail and that the Paris-based assault
could not be successful. Lecuna, without delay, conveyed to him a note in
a Bank of Venezuela envelope stating “Very grateful.” The son explains
that others on the list, rightfully fearful of being targeted by Gómez, did
not acknowledge the presence of their names on it.6 To be a friend of
Gabaldón Iragory was to be an enemy of Gómez, as many thought the
dictator would conclude, particularly if one gave Gómez reason to think
that he was in fact offering support. Lecuna was brave.
Texts can both paper over and reveal key historical moments. Lecuna,
whose 1930 edition could not but participate in the glorification of the
Gómez state even when that was not his intention, just a few years earlier
had brought out two massive volumes of Bolívar’s and Sucre’s letters in
relation to the creation of Bolivia for the anniversary of the Battle of
Ayacucho of December 9, 1824.7
178  R. T. CONN

The two volumes entitled Documentos referentes a la creacíon de Bolivia

(Documents Regarding the Creation of Bolivia) were not simply a collection
of texts of historical significance. They appeared with a lengthy historical
narrative entitled “Resumen de las guerras de Bolívar” (“Summary of the
Wars of Bolívar”), which reconstructs Bolívar’s campaigns as a military epic
pitting a resilient and tenacious republican leader against the Spanish.
Lecuna’s strategy in his historical narrative was clear to view. It was to
use the military figure to redefine Bolívar and independence as represent-
ing republican liberty. It was also, with the Ayacucho centenary as a plat-
form, to re-establish independence as an international war. Gil Fortoul
and Vallenilla Lanz folded both Bolívar and independence into strictly
national constructs for the purpose of managing and defining Gómez’s
Venezuela. Republicanism was a stage—an international one signifying the
Enlightenment—that was the product of an aristocratic world—that of the
mantuanos—that had failed. Venezuela had learned the lessons of his-
tory—Venezuelan history—namely that the new contemporary moment
required an extra-constitutional leader and an administrative elite. Lecuna,
with these volumes as with the previous books plus the heritage project
that was the Casa Natal, was methodically building a cultural edifice to
oppose to that of his rivals while preparing the way for the new national
liberalism that would become dominant after Gómez’s death in 1935
though with military figures continuing to control the state. Gómez
understood that the path to stability, as historian Judith Ewell has written,
was not by playing Europe and the United States off each other, as his
predecessor, Cipriano Castro had, but by cooperating with the United
States while surrounding himself with impressive intellectuals, following
in this way the example of Páez.8
Gómez knew whom he had in Gil Fortoul and Vallenilla Lanz, but did
he know whom he had in Lecuna who was inventing new institutions for
Venezuela? Did he or Gil Fortoul or Vallenilla Lanz understand Lecuna’s
legacy project? Did they comprehend that he was creating professional
relationships to scholars in the international arena, scholars with whom to
dialogue about Bolívar? Did they grasp the significance of his project of
publishing the documents of the Archivo de Libertador? Did they see that
collecting and editing were also political acts?
The reception of Lecuna’s 1930 ten-volume collection of Bolívar’s pri-
vate letters commissioned by the government of Vicente Gómez in 1928
to celebrate the centenary of the Libertador’s passing just as had been the
second edition of Gil Fortoul’s Constitutional History of Venezuela could
 7  THE CONSTRUCTION OF A PATRICIAN HERITAGE AND OF CALUMNY…  179

not have been more successful internationally, with academics from differ-
ent nations praising the philological meticulousness with which Lecuna
approached the task.9
In the United States, an important oil ally of the Gómez government,
major historians reviewed the edition from William Spence Robertson
to Joseph B. Lockey to A. Curtis Wilgus. These scholars listed for read-
ers previous editions or collections of Bolívar’s writings, reducing what
in many cases were political interventions to moments in the single
cumulative story they imagined of texts being assembled for historical
research with Lecuna’s volumes being something of a pinnacle.10 Lecuna
had pushed the production of knowledge about Bolívar away from
Europe, with its race and sociological models, to the United States
where a new cadre of historians with expertise on Bolívar and Latin
America had emerged. They would see in Lecuna a partner just as he
would see one in them.
The glowing reception of the edition, then, was part of a larger phe-
nomenon in the United States, where there was already an audience for
things Latin American, and in particular Bolivarian, this the result of
Pan Americanism, which had acquired a new ideological force with the
1910 completion of the Pan American Union building in Washington,
D.C., and, as we have discussed earlier and will continue to discuss in sub-
sequent chapters, the 1930 centenary of Bolívar’s death. Lecuna, for
whom the United States was more than just one of the nation states in the
hemisphere, traveled to Washington, D.C., in 1916, to participate in a Pan
American meeting, right at the beginning of his project to make the
Archivo del Libertador into a center piece of the Venezuelan nation and
along with this to produce edited volumes of his writings. During that
visit, he could have visited the historic home of George Washington,
Mount Vernon, learning more about this kind of building with his new
appointment as director of the Casa Natal.
Lecuna consolidated his cultural authority immediately after Gómez’s
death. In 1937, he and former Gómez general and collaborator, Eleazar
López Contreras, now president of the country, founded the Bolivarian
Society. López Contreras had been elected president by the Council of
Ministers the year before and had wasted no time in passing a new consti-
tution that outlawed communism. The measure was not only to suppress
Venezuela’s communist party, founded clandestinely in 1931, but also to
manage the return of exiles who had established communist affiliations
outside the country, as in the case of Rómulo Betancourt, who was exiled
180  R. T. CONN

again upon his return, then allowed to come back after renouncing his
affiliation. In a clear statement of his rejection of Gómez, López Contreras
razed La Rotunda, Gómez’s infamous jail that dated back to the late
1840s when it was begun by Carlos Soublette and completed by José
Tadeo Monagas, modeled on Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon.
Lecuna defined the Bolivarian Society through the values of honor,
loyalty, and authenticity. For this purpose, he adopted the figure of the
Liberator’s first and perhaps most authoritative biographer, the Irish aide-
de-camp, Daniel Florencio O’Leary, of whom we have already spoken.
Lecuna went back to the beginnings, so to speak, sources that in this case
portrayed Bolívar as a liberal. Calling on O’Leary just as Blanco Fombona
had, Lecuna uses his voice to defend Bolívar against his critics, whom he
referred to as his so-called slanderers or calumniators. Calumny, misrepre-
senting another to harm that person’s reputation, was a category that was
familiar in public discourse in nineteenth-century Latin America, as it was
in the discourse of these times in the United States and Europe, with
political leaders accusing one another of damaging their reputations. It
became the organizing category for the Bolivarian Society.
The polemic that his multiple acts and decisions generated both in his
own times and after, such as his War to the Death, Bolívar’s constitutions,
and his vision of a lifetime president, first spoken of in the Jamaica Letter,
were set aside. The history of the uses of Bolívar now centered on Bolívar
as a human subject who was a genius and a model of virtue whose reputa-
tion and honor had to be defended. Forget Venezuela’s rejection of Bolívar
and the recuperation of his figure by the Liberal Party, and then, the river
of ink sp ilt in a tradition built upon competing claims on his figure, which
most recently included those of Gil Fortoul and Vallenilla Lanz. It was as
if the society was the first entity since O’Leary to lay claim to the proper
understanding of Bolívar’s figure. Representing Bolívar’s intellectual pro-
duction would be as simple as collecting and reproducing what was
already there.
The contrast with Gil Fortoul and Vallenilla Lanz could not have been
more apparent. These historians had presented Bolívar’s writings as an
object to parse through in order to reveal the figure who meets the needs
of the authoritarian present they defend. Lecuna and the Bolivarian Society
presented them as objects to be appreciated, artifacts through which to
establish a foundation for their heritage-building project. In the hands of
the society, they acquire, then, value in and of themselves—objects to be
collected and displayed. Everything now is re-publishable, from miscella-
 7  THE CONSTRUCTION OF A PATRICIAN HERITAGE AND OF CALUMNY…  181

neous texts of his to major ones, with the society dutifully celebrating
Bolívar’s most important writings on the dates associated with the
moments of their production—whether Bolívar’s 1812 Cartagena
Manifesto, his 1815 Jamaica Letter, his 1819 Angostura Address, his 1826
Bolivian Constitution, or others—and also honoring them with special
issues. Heritage building through reproduction of his writings together
with letters and responses from illustrious individuals intersected seam-
lessly with new academic fields harnessed to celebrate his figure. French
positivism’s notion of the social organism is no more. It has now been
replaced by an understanding of history based on the individual, Hispanic
culture and literature, classicism, as well as by other interpretive practices
in which textual criticism is practiced.
In one instance, the pseudo-science of graphology or handwriting anal-
ysis that had come into being after World War I acquired relevance, with a
US scholar in this field analyzing Bolívar’s first known letter from 1799
and drawing conclusions on the topic of what the 16-year-old’s letter said
about his person and character at the time of the production of the docu-
ment. According to the US scholar, this young Bolívar showed a certain
esthetic sensibility by virtue of how he spaced the margins. But he was just
an ordinary kid, displaying no clear signs of his future self.11 The scholar
was paying tribute to Blanco Fombona’s 1942 Mocedades de Bolívar
(Youthful Deeds of Bolívar), where Blanco Fombona in fact makes refer-
ence to the badly written letter, stating that it is interesting that this young
man who showed his inner spirit when he challenged the viceroy in 1779
in Mexico City still does not know how to write a letter. “Soon he will
learn. Because he carries within himself the seed of the love of books and
writing; and he possesses a vibrant and fine vigor.”12
Lecuna was not the first to make use of the concepts of virtue and honor
in the context of the Venezuelan state’s management of Bolívar’s letters.
So had Vallenilla Lanz, who deployed the concepts in his 1914 review of
El imperio de los Andes (The Empire of the Andes) by Carlos A. Villanueva
at the time that he was director of the National Archive (1913–1915).13
He presents the author as having committed an error of interpretation.
Villanueva, who published the book in Paris, at a safe distance from
Venezuela, had written it in response to the new Gómez political order.14
In the review, Vallenilla Lanz accuses Villanueva of misreading a letter
written by Bolívar to Santander and of using that purported misreading to
assert that the only reason Bolívar did not seek to become emperor was
the example in Mexico of Iturbide, executed by his own people.15
Villanueva drapes Bolívar with all the illiberal affiliations handed down
182  R. T. CONN

over the decades by supporters and critics alike, including that of his iden-
tification with Napoleon, presenting him not only as a wannabe monarch
or emperor, but also as a figure who took without attribution ideas that
become central to his own intellectual persona, including from Miranda
the concept of the Moral Branch, and from the French consular constitu-
tion of 1799–1804 the idea of the lifelong president.16 Vallenilla Lanz, not
willing to abide the view that Bolívar had a dictatorial spirit or as being
intellectually irresponsible, goes for what in Venezuelan polite society
would have been seen as the jugular, calling Villanueva a disgrace to his
family’s name. But Vallenilla Lanz had to show, of course, that he was
right. With the apparent totality of Bolívar’s texts behind him, The Archivo
del Libertador having been in existence for more than two decades, he
argues that no single text is sufficient as a portal to the truth of an author
and that, furthermore, all texts must be read in the context of the larger
corpus, that is, the author’s. Affirming the need, then, to be methodologi-
cally rigorous, which he equates with the possibility of seeing Bolívar in
the light of the totality of his writings, he not only drowns out the indi-
vidual letter in question by presenting it as part of the larger corpus of
which he was in possession. He also presents Bolívar through the European
sociology and race models he had mastered during his stint in Europe in
the first decade of the new century as a positivist or sociologist avant la
lettre who understood society as developing slowly under the direction of
an administrative elite.17
Vallenilla Lanz is using the concept of honor to construct a form of
patriotism. In subsequent years, in addition to his written work, he pre-
sided over centennial ceremonies commemorating the battles of Boyacá
(1819), Carabobo (1821), and Ayacucho (1824), finding in these dates
on which victory over the Spanish was achieved in New Granada,
Venezuela, and Peru, respectively, symbolic beginnings for a Latin America
he wanted to imagine without constitutions. As if shadowing him, Lecuna,
with his editions, kept the liberal tradition alive.
In his 1930 edition, Gil Fortoul speaks of Bolívar’s family as having
African blood and attacks Venezuela’s creoles even more strongly than he
had in 1907, detailing how for centuries they fabricated their whiteness.
Examining and exposing the mechanics of that social class structure, as he
had done in the first edition but now expanding upon this, he ridicules
and attacks the elites. He underlines the utter lack of foundation for their
claims of white racial purity and the unreliability of skin color in itself as a
sign of race. He states that mixing among races was the custom in
 7  THE CONSTRUCTION OF A PATRICIAN HERITAGE AND OF CALUMNY…  183

Venezuela from the times of the adventurous Spanish noblemen, as he

called them, who, knowing no rule or limit, “satisfied their amorous urges
with Indians, mestizas (mixed race), and blacks as well as zambas (Indians
mixed with blacks)” and who often entered into what he called sexual
union with Indians, which, he states, was allowed. Using Bolívar to drive
home his position that pure whiteness among the elites was a fiction, he
states that Bolívar’s family had mestizo blood by the end of the colonial
period. “Later,” he writes, “it is a known fact that a sister and niece of the
Liberator married pardos.”18
This was the vision of the mantuanos that Lecuna had been contesting
in the racial politics of the era. The promise of a mestizo Venezuela meant
authoritarian government. For this reason, Lecuna fought back, defend-
ing his white patriotic patricians while not substantiating the fact of mix-
ing—the reality that more than half the population of Venezuela was pardo
and that mixing was, ironically, the rule even among the mantuanos who
had to document that they were 100% white. Building a racial fort, he
refused to recognize Venezuela’s multi-cultural and multi-racial colonial
society, defined by continuing immigration and the associating of peoples
of different racial backgrounds, with, as Rodríguez O. tells us, new lower-
class whites from the Canary Islands finding community and bonds among
pardos. For Lecuna, who is playing a game of custodianship of the past
against the hard-hitting realism of Gil Fortoul and Vallenilla Lanz, defend-
ing virtue, a social class and the archive all became one. Calumniators,
though, were not only at home, they were also abroad.
The moment was the 1940s and the context was a dispute concerning
the publication, in 1940, of San Martín y Bolívar en la entrevista de
Guayaquil, a la luz de nuevos documentos (San Martín and Bolívar at Their
Meeting in Guayaquil, in the Light of New Definitive Documents) by
Argentine ambassador to Peru, Eduardo Colombres Mármol.19 With this
edition, Colombres Mármol claimed to offer to the world a set of letters
explaining San Martín’s abrupt exit from the liberation process and why,
despite this, he continued to be important during the last two years of the
war through his legacy, letters he claimed to have found in an archive in
Lima, Peru that included three authored by Bolívar, Sucre, and Santander,
respectively. The most important of the letters found, however, was one that
had been at the center of a national discussion in Buenos Aires, a letter sup-
posedly sent by San Martín to Simón Bolívar, dated August 29, 1822, and
of which only a French language copy of the “original” had been in circula-
tion. A French sailor by the name of Lafond published it in 1826.
184  R. T. CONN

As the story went, Lafond met San Martín on his transatlantic crossing,
during or after which San Martín gave him the letter to copy. In the letter,
San Martín laments that Bolívar refused his military assistance for the cam-
paigns in Peru, accuses him of being less than truthful about the reasons
why, intimating selfish if not nationalist motives related to the Gran
Colombia of which he was president in absentia, and announces his deci-
sion to leave Latin America in order to allow Bolívar to exercise complete
authority over the remainder of the independence process. Some
Argentines, pleased to have a document explaining their national hero’s
untimely departure, insisted that the letter had to be authentic for the
simple reason that its veracity had been attested to by the esteemed
Argentine historian of the nineteenth century, Bartolomé Mitre. If an his-
torian of Mitre’s stature did not question the letter’s validity, they rea-
soned, on what authority could an historian in the twentieth century do so?
For the new Bolivarian Society, Colombres Mármol’s publication was a
first-order act of besmirchment of the historical record. After years of
going back and forth in the press, Lecuna brought out in 1948 El mitin de
Guayaquil: Reestablecimiento de la verdad histórica (The Guayaquil
Meeting: Reestablishment of the Historical Truth). In the lead essay of the
volume, his associate, Venezuelan intellectual Vicente Dávila, performed
the labor of debunking the authenticity of the letters, going through them
point by point. With regard to the Lafond letter, he states that at the time
of the Guayaquil meeting, it would not have occurred to San Martín to
insist that troops were desperately needed in Peru since his own far out-
numbered the Spanish. On the important matter of who was responsible
for the victory at Ayacucho, Dávila asks: why would Sucre, as the new let-
ter attested to, write to San Martín before he wrote to Bolívar to deliver
the news of the Ayacucho victory? Would he really have thought to credit
him with the victory for the reason that some troops under his command
had been trained by the Argentine leader? What of the letter attributed to
Bolívar? When there was ample evidence that the only signature used by
the Libertador in the latter part of his career consisted just of the surname,
“Bolívar,” was not the signature that appeared there, including also his first
name, “Simón,” a dead give-away that the document was inauthentic?20
Lecuna himself was biting and sarcastic. Colombres Mármol had
accused Venezuelans of having destroyed San Martín’s original letter.
From Lecuna’s position now of national scholar, the new Renan of
Venezuela in the post-Gómez period, having replaced Gil Fortoul and
Vallenilla Lanz, he writes: “We have not reached the cultural level of other
 7  THE CONSTRUCTION OF A PATRICIAN HERITAGE AND OF CALUMNY…  185

countries. We have still not learned to falsify historical documents, nor to

remove them from the archives.”21
Lecuna had brought the Venezuelan and the Argentine nations into a
duel of sorts. A man’s word was at stake. Lecuna was that man. In the
course of the debate over the veracity of the Lafond letter in the 1940s,
Lecuna was on the attack, harnessing the archives he had been assembling
since the 1910s, not only that of the Libertador but those of other leaders
of the independence movement as well, to respond to the claim made by
Colombres Mármol that a new archive had been found with letters con-
tained by no other in the world. If for the Venezuelan banker, historian,
and editor, as well as for many other philologists from the time, the labor
of securing, organizing, and holding on to the documents of the past had
the status of a foundational truth, for Lecuna here was an opportunity to
put his Archivo del Libertador into action. Lecuna was transforming his
rhetoric of honor into the honor of the nation. To question his under-
standing of Bolívar and independence was to question Venezuela. But
what about Bolívar the state builder? Lecuna did not address the debates
that historically had swirled around Bolívar’s idea of the state and vision
for the executive. He spoke of the 1811 constitution, not of his Gran
Colombia or of the 1826 Bolivian Constitution, or the lifetime president.
Bolívar was a leader of independence, a military man who was a strategist,
and a noble white patrician.
The military coup of 1945 sent into exile López Contreras, who had
passed the presidency on to another general in 1941, some praising him
for ensuring that the transition entailed no violence. Marcos Pérez
Jiménez, an enemy of Gómez and therefore of López Contreras, had
taken power. Lecuna, though, remained, as he always did, identified with
a form of cultural capital that was usable by each new iteration of the post-
Gómez state. Did Lecuna help preserve the liberal tradition in the face of
fascism? If there were doubts about where he stood on the matter of gov-
ernment, one edition he put out shed much light. This was a 1947 leather-
bound tome, requested by the 1945–1947 Trienio Adeco (Adeco
Triennium), led by the new political party Acción Democrática (Democratic
Action), political leader Rómulo Betancourt, and General Pérez Jiménez.
Through it—the signature Bolívar alone on the cover to draw attention to
Bolívar the letter writer—Lecuna gives the public a modern Bolívar who
stands for democratic values.22 But with the free elections of 1948 that saw
the writer Rómulo Gallegos win the presidency, Venezuela in the eyes of
186  R. T. CONN

the military had gone too far to the Left. Betancourt, head of the Left-
leaning Acción Democrática (Democratic Action, the AD), would be
forced into exile along with Gallegos. Once again, Lecuna remained, just
as he had when the AD and the military came into power in 1945.

A Conservative Elite and a Hemispheric Order

in the Age of Oil and the Cold War

In 1969, writes Germán Carrera Damas in El culto a Bolívar, the

Venezuelan Congress established a law prohibiting so-called vulgar uses
of Bolívar’s effigy while in the same year ordering the distribution of
80,000 oil prints, the visual medium that to the minds of its members, we
can think, was most proper for representing him.23 What provided this
congress—heir to a new political process begun in 1935 though inter-
rupted by military dictatorship from 1948 to 1958—with the ideological
grist to promulgate such a law was the Bolivarian Society. Supported by
the oil-rich state, with its own budget line, the society increasingly pro-
vided a space for social, political, and academic actors from the center
and the right to make claims for their top-down visions, actors who used
Lecuna’s Bolívar to draw and contain the borders of the liberal state
against its critics in the context of an international order underwritten by
the United States, the Pan American Union the United States oversaw
(1910–1948), and the Organization of American States (OAS) (1948–).
In the 1950s, the society became international in scope as it set up sister
societies in the Americas and Europe, with Bolívar’s mentor Simón
Rodriguez’s pedagogic project in Bolivia promoted as one example of
the international reach of the Bolívar legacy. A 1953 issue of its bulletin
was dedicated to the new Bolivarian Society in Hanover, Germany,
another in that same year to the Bolivarian Society in Haiti. Included in
the bulletins—inspired by those of the Pan American Union of which we
will speak in a later chapter—were scholarly pieces and essays written by
both Venezuelan and non-Venezuelan actors, notices of state-sponsored
programs, correspondence of Bolívar and his interlocutors, including a
letter from US  President Andrew Jackson telling Bolívar he could not
accept a gift from him on account of US emolument laws, pieces detail-
ing the history of monuments honoring him, and information about
descendants of Bolívar who were in need of financial assistance and whom
the society was helping.24
 7  THE CONSTRUCTION OF A PATRICIAN HERITAGE AND OF CALUMNY…  187

Venezuela, as Lecuna had hoped, was using the project of heritage

building for ambitious state purposes, particularly its foreign policy, chan-
neling its oil wealth and power to create a hemispheric zone of influence.
What Lecuna had first conceived of to defeat Gil Fortoul and Vallenilla
Lanz and then continued in an expanded form with the creation of the
Bolivarian Society in 1937 endured and gained force through the coun-
try’s changes, the elites now maintaining their position as members of the
state’s seemingly oldest institution—all of them patriots.
Here is a quick sketch of the content of the bulletin from the 1950s to
the 1970s, its hemispheric ideological ambitions in the context of authori-
tarianism, liberalism, and the Cold War in evidence.
1953: an issue carries a news release from the Colombian military
detailing the establishment that year of a required course on Bolívar in the
nation’s schools, the military in the eyes of the Bolivarian Society waging
a just war against members and descendants of the Liberal Party in the
middle of the period called La Violencia (1948–1958).25
1969: an issue features, on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the
1819 Angostura Address, an essay by the Colombian writer Germán
Arciniegas, a well-known critic of military governments, and by this time, of
communism. In an intervention reflecting the critical stance he had been
giving voice to since the early 1950s, a victim of censorship in his country
and elsewhere in Latin America (in Colombia, ironically, at the hands of the
same military previously celebrated by the society), he presents Bolívar’s
Correo del Orinoco (Orinoco Post) from the period of the Third Republic and
the Gran Colombia as an example of the principle of freedom of the press.26
1974: an issue reproduces a political speech given by the president of
the Dominican Republic and long-time strongman and anti-communist
Joaquín Balaguer. Telling the Dominican people of the discovery in the
nation’s cathedral of the remains of a far-removed ancestor of Bolívar, a
member of the colonial administration of Santo Domingo, Balaguer uses
a version of Bolívar’s genealogical tree to legitimize the racial and political
hierarchy he continually defended. Bolívar is described as descended from
a family of white Basque ancestry, whiteness a category of great impor-
tance to this actor who had served under Rafael Trujillo, and is said to
represent a model of governance that reconciles the values of order with
those of liberty, a model in absolute harmony, he tells his audience, with
the principles of the Organization of American States.27
188  R. T. CONN

And also in 1974: Venezuelan historian José Luis Salcedo-Bastardo, on

the opposite end of the political spectrum from Balaguer but standing
against the established Left, in a formulation perhaps stretching credulity
presents Bolívar’s support of seizing the wealth and assets of fleeing royal-
ists to redistribute to Independentist soldiers, “the poor of the time,” as
evidence of his progressiveness.28
In 1954 Lecuna produced an oversize volume detailing the restoration
of the Casa Natal and the contents of the Archivo. It was created for del-
egates to the Tenth Inter-American Conference held in Caracas in that
year, right in the middle of the military dictatorship of Marcos Pérez
Jiménez that was now technically a presidency and the moment the famous
Simón Bolívar Towers opened.29
In the volume, Lecuna puts on display for the visiting inter-American
diplomatic corps his scholarly and cultural achievement. We see him cele-
brate the late colonial period in Venezuela by reproducing through pho-
tography the objects on display in the Casa Natal, objects that Venezuelan
elites and the public at large had long been consuming. The volume
includes photographs of household pieces in the Casa Natal, some, we are
told, originals, having been used by the Bolívar family, others objects
acquired from the collections of scions of distinguished families from the
colonial period. The borrowed objects are carefully attributed, accompa-
nied by photographs of portraits of the individuals from whose estates
they have been taken, members, we know, of the so-called mantuano class
whose position in society depended on their claims to whiteness. Never
mind the violence of the casta distinctions of those centuries to which José
Martí points in his reflection on Bolívar in 1893 or the critical reflections
of Vallenilla Lanz and Gil Fortoul on the racial politics of the mantuanos
and Venezuelan slave society. All we see are the objects and faces presented
in the photographs, the same objects and faces at the center of the project
of the Casa Natal and of the Bolivarian Society, and that had been repro-
duced in the latter’s bulletins along with other images of the interior of the
Casa Natal, including the frescoes of Tito Salas: all this to create a noble
patrician past and story of independence to serve as a platform for current
and new occupants of republicanism, honor, and whiteness. The delegates
to the Tenth Inter-American Conference who opened the book could
think they were seeing Venezuela when what they were viewing was a cul-
tural artifact, the result of one person’s will to make a nobility that was
exclusionary and fictitious. The power of an historic home to create a
national story!
 7  THE CONSTRUCTION OF A PATRICIAN HERITAGE AND OF CALUMNY…  189

Lecuna produced the volume to perform not only an external function,

but also an internal one. He wanted to send a message to Pérez Jiménez
and to his advisors in a moment in which the city was considering razing
the historic district of the Casa Natal and the Bolívar Plaza. In a decade in
which Caracas was being remade, its oil money the foundation for this,
and the site of massive state-sanctioned immigration from Europe in what
was an explicit whitening project, Lecuna, who advocates passionately
against these municipal plans in letters, equates the reconstruction of the
district with the diminishment of a heritage and identity that the state had
long used to promote its interests. Lecuna wanted to hold on to the sym-
bolic space that he had helped carve out by re-creating the Casa Natal and
establishing the Bolivarian Society. He had produced for Venezuela a
usable national culture for a country that had been racked by civil war and
that had been defined by fascist ideology. Destroying the historic center
was tantamount to destroying his project.
The National Pantheon would still be available as a site to exploit.
Would that be of interest to him? Probably not. Lecuna, who was Catholic
and who defended Catholicism as part of his virtuous Venezuela, would
have seen it as something monstrous, an act of sacrilege on the part of the
anti-Catholic Guzmán Blanco who rebuilt the church only to use it for a
secularizing mission. What would there be to conserve and hold on to?
Pérez Jiménez did not raze the historic district. But Lecuna had been
dealing with another problem. This was a major biography written by a
well-known exiled Spanish intellectual and former diplomat who had
been given access to the Archivo del Libertador in Caracas by Lecuna,
Salvador de Madariaga. In 1951 Madariaga brought out at a Mexican
press a massive two-volume biography, Bolívar,30 and the following year
in English a shorter version.31 Talk about dishonor. This was treason. The
book attacked the Liberator and by extension, perhaps, Lecuna. Evidently,
Madariaga had not approved of the racial and social hierarchies over
which the Bolivarian Society presided. He portrays late-colonial Venezuela
as an institutionally rich society that hardly was calling out for indepen-
dence. What had become of Venezuela outside the bounds of the empire
in which it had once thrived? Who was Bolívar and who were his custo-
dians? These questions were aggressively asked by Madariaga who had
fought for liberalism in Spain in the 1920s and 1930s as well as for the
League of Nations, to which he had been Spain’s delegate, and who since
1936, the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, was in exile in Britain and
was a fierce critic of Francisco Franco.
190  R. T. CONN

Beginning in the 1940s, constitutional monarchy for Madariaga was

now the answer for a Spain that had been unable to preserve the Second
Republic (1931–1936) brutally overcome by fascism.32 Fascism and
communism taught him that personalistic leaders who strive to impose
entirely new political orders must be taken down.
Lecuna and his colleagues dismissed the book, as did many others in
Latin America. In one instance he took issue with a reviewer who agreed
with Madariaga’s claim about the racial identity of the leaders of indepen-
dence. Responding to the reviewer’s characterization of them, Lecuna
writes that Madariaga misrepresents the leaders as mestizos instead of as
whites.33 At a time of wide hemispheric interest in Bolívar, Madariaga
assails the country at the center of that phenomenon using a wide selection
of sources including those used by Marx for his devastating account of the
leader. He lists in his prologue all the cities in Latin America to which he
has gone to acquire documents, presenting Caracas as but one. He explains
that he has had to travel to the archives himself as such a task cannot be
delegated when so much can be ascertained by handling the material one-
self. The archival authority claimed by Madariaga is immense. But in read-
ing him, one does not feel the presence of documents, as it is as if one were
reading a novel, the story line about Bolívar’s flawed character front and
center—the work a page turner. Lecuna and Madariaga exchanged cordial
but pointed notes, with Madariaga stating that he understands his anger as
it was that of the “patient who had just undergone an operation.”34 The
issue did not go away for the society. Following Lecuna’s death in 1954, it
continued to be concerned with Madariaga’s biography of Bolívar, pub-
lishing a collection of articles in 1967 that rebutted it.
Madariaga’s volume was the third in a trilogy, the first about Columbus
and the second about Cortés, all claiming to present the unseen figure. In
exile in London, he wrote many of his works in English, publishing at
presses in the United States, though for this one, as we have stated, he
penned it in both Spanish and English. For this work he creates a racial-
ized system to analyze Bolívar in behaviors he links to his racial makeup as
Spanish white, pardo, and mestizo, the latter two “in small proportions.”35
He speaks of three races: Spanish white, black, and Indian, each important
for the identities indicated. Bolívar, according to Madariaga, was black for
three reasons: his physical features; his behavior, particularly in regard to
his sensuality and sexual conduct, these racist stereotypes of the time; and
his periodic lack of concern for fighting Spain—Africans having been
transplanted to the New World through “the crime and cruelty of the
 7  THE CONSTRUCTION OF A PATRICIAN HERITAGE AND OF CALUMNY…  191

whites” in the course of history and having not developed a sense of Spain
as the enemy because “the black knew that in Spanish lands his brethren
were treated better than under any other banner in the New World and
could gain their liberty more easily.”36 Finally, we are told that Bolívar is
mestizo or Indian in the sense that he embodies the resentment of the
indigenous communities against the Spanish conquerors.
Whether the reviewer to whom Lecuna responded understood that
Madariaga was inventing a racialized interpretive framework and was using
it to undercut historical actors—whether pardos or creoles (Bolívar, for
instance, fights the Spanish not because he is defending creole interests
but because he is being driven to do so by the injustices of the conquest
and colonization)—is not important for our purposes. We are interested in
the reaction on the part of Lecuna, which is telling when there was more
he could have said, and he did. But if Lecuna could not bear to imagine a
mestizo Bolívar in the context of his defense of whiteness as first conceived
in his battle with Gómez’s imposing regime theorists, what Madariaga
asserts is indeed incendiary, namely that Bolívar was nothing but a mega-
lomaniac who was willing to do anything to seize and hold on to power
and who—as if this were the greatest affront to the European humanist—
had no deep interest in philosophy or the classics, simply making use of
them as he needs to. Madariaga writes, “[W]e must bear in mind that the
chief influence on Bolívar’s thought was that of Bolívar himself.”37
To attack Bolívar’s intellectual genealogy, Madariaga distinguishes
between the collective psychological past and the unique psychological
present, the first defined by racial legacy, the second by ego. How does he
find content for the part of his formulation pertaining to his discussion of
Bolívar’s ego? He examines Bolívar’s correspondence, which he represents
himself to have constituted as no one has ever before. Placing letters at the
center of his narrative while making them into a portal into Bolívar’s con-
sciousness, he simultaneously tells of Bolívar’s extraordinary acts while
revealing the selfish intentions behind them through analysis. Bolívar goes
to battle against Spain, produces the Angostura Address where he
announces abolition of slavery, both incorporates pardos into his army and
keeps the pardo movement down, not because of his commitment to the
public good—building a new political community free of Spain and inclu-
sive of peoples of different races with creoles in the dominant position—
but because of his own will to power. Neither the Classics nor Enlightenment
thought is what motivates him but rather his own ego, which activates the
wellspring of longue-durée racial legacies that are within him, legacies that
192  R. T. CONN

in the absence of a sound motivation to activate and channel them become

nothing but props, and independence the stage Bolívar creates to realize
himself and only himself. Latin America did not need independence.
Bolívar did.
Historians beyond Venezuela responded, saying that independence was
historically necessary, that Bolívar was concerned with the public, that he
was an Enlightenment thinker and a classicist. They did not focus on
Madariaga’s use of Freud and psychology, the major cultural critical para-
digm of the moment, as we will also see in a later chapter in our discussion
of the 1951 biography of Bolívar of the US American Waldo Frank. Those
also familiar with Madariaga’s critical writings on the United States could
not have missed the European prejudice behind the author’s statement
presenting Bolívar as a self-interested dilettante.
The house museum that was the Casa Natal, and that perhaps had
inspired Madariaga to see independence as a stage, permitted the society
more than the possibility of reconstructing a social class. It also allowed for
an in-depth exploration of Bolívar family lineage off-site, in the pages of
the bulletin. Gil Fortoul and Vallenilla Lanz had traced the history of
Venezuela’s leading families tying them to the oligarchical order of the
1830s to the 1850s and to the violence of the political parties. For
Vallenilla Lanz, no one was who he said he was on a political level. All were
defined by biological, family inheritance as was Antonio Leocadio Guzmán,
founder of the Liberal Party, whose father was a Spanish royalist. How
could Guzmán be a Liberal, never mind the founder of the Liberal Party,
with such a past? Vallenilla Lanz, like Madariaga, was a master of revealing
the invisible.
On the one hand, the bulletin features the ancestors, relations contem-
porary to Bolívar and descendants, all assembled as the nation’s first family.
With regard to third- and fourth-generations of that family, it documents,
as noted earlier, financial assistance provided to them by the society. For
the tracing of lineage, the bulletin incorporates information provided by
Blanco Fombona in Mocedades de Bolívar (Youthful Deeds of Bolívar). In
the 1920s, he had acquired research by Bolívar genealogists in Madrid on
the Palacios and Bolívar family lines. Palacios is the last name of
Bolívar’s mother.
Bolívar’s family lineage was now itself an object of reflection made to
provide an intimate and in-depth experience of Venezuela’s patrician class.
 7  THE CONSTRUCTION OF A PATRICIAN HERITAGE AND OF CALUMNY…  193

With images of Bolívar and his extended family and photographs of mem-
bers of the Bolivarian Society running through the issues of the bulletin,
whiteness is represented without being represented—the images duplicat-
ing what was purportedly there and real. In addition to the Bolívar family,
there was also the national family that the Bolívar lineage made possible.
Included are leaders connected to the Bolívar epic and Venezuela’s nine-
teenth century. José Tadeo Monagas was one such figure, though there is
no discussion of the Guerra Federal. He enters the society’s pantheon as
an important Venezuelan individual, no more, no less.
A social class that decades before had been known through the lens of
instability, insurrection, and exile now has an invented past to constitute
its protagonism and impose its hegemony. But the society does not only
use the Bolívar family to re-domesticate Venezuelan history. It also takes
advantage of Bolívar’s private life including his sexual conduct, which it
includes in its project to disseminate Bolívar’s figure among the Venezuelan
middle and upper classes and the world at large. Addressing the well-
known matter of the many lovers in Bolívar’s life after the passing of his
wife, a member of the mostly male society wrote in 1953 that Bolívar was
a gentleman who was discrete in the way he pursued his love life. He is
refuting a suggestion made by another member that Bolívar in Bogotá in
1828 could have enjoyed the city by riding with his companion, Manuela
Sáenz, in a landau, a luxury carriage for city use. But, evidently, he could
never have done such a thing, keeping, as he always did, his affairs private,
an achievement when one considers all the women who were apparently
drawn to him.38
Manuela Sáenz, his most important companion from 1822 until his last
months, belonged, the reader is told, to that private sphere. Gentlemen
like Bolívar certainly do not “exhibit” their lovers. In the decades ahead,
Bolívar’s private life continued to be an object of interest in a male-cen-
tered world that continued to want to reconcile the fact that he had mul-
tiple lovers with the idea of the gentleman. This formulation had to do
with his fidelity to Manuela Sáenz. As one society member submits in an
article from 1983, “Anti-don Juan, Bolívar does not deceive, does not
mock, does not dishonor. In his last letters to Manuelita running is a small
fountain of regrets and sorrows.”39 The expression of regret by the man
apparently redeems him in the eyes of both parties in the heterosexual
relationship. Honor can be recovered, asserts the society member.
194  R. T. CONN

This heteronormative tradition of reflection on Bolívar’s libertine pri-

vate life that presents Bolívar as honorable, though, would be disrupted
when Venezuelan novelist Denzil Romero in 1988 takes on the mores
propagandized by the Bolivarian Society by moving away from Bolívar’s
libertine life to that of Manuela Sáenz in his erotic novel, La esposa del doc-
tor Thorne (The Wife of Dr. Thorne).40 Beginning the novel with the scene
of Bolívar’s August 1828 dictatorship—with words parodying the leader’s
many titles and deep lineage—Romero provides his audience with a sexu-
ally defiant Manuela Sáenz who questions heteronormativity through her
alleged bisexuality and through her own sexual escapades that rival if not
surpass Bolívar’s.41 Gay sexuality is affirmed and the matter of sexual ori-
entation goes from a private affair to a public one. The question Romero
asks is, who are we as sexual beings?
Instrumentalizations of the pairing in public discourse continued.
Chávez, in striking contrast to Romero’s vision and the society’s gentle-
manly understanding of one of their own, deployed the pair by harnessing
it for his mausoleum project—completed just after his death in 2013—a
towering modernist structure that provides not only a new, even more
monumental space for Bolívar’s tomb than the National Pantheon, where
it had resided for some 150 years and above which Chávez’s mausoleum
rose, but also a tomb for the non-Venezuelan Manuela Sáenz. In its mas-
sive chambers reaching for the skies in the way the naves of Gothic cathe-
drals do and where a British-inspired guard detail dressed in red with black
headwear is on duty—the requisite changing of the guard performed
daily—the two were reunited, appearing as an ideal of the heterosexual
faithful couple, father and mother of a nation.
The vision of an honorable Bolívar constructed by Lecuna had been
repurposed. It was no longer that of a white elitist state with an esteemed
society of intellectuals, senators, and business people to manage it but
rather a populist one that had given a place to the excluded masses.
Wanting to maintain his hold on power, just as previous Venezuelan lead-
ers had, Chávez created a shrine to protect his Bolívar and his Venezuela.
He was preserving and fortifying institutions handed down: both Lecuna’s
Casa Natal, which continued to be an important space for him, and
Guzmán Blanco’s pantheon, which he simultaneously reaffirmed and built
over. Chávez, as we indicated in Chap. 1, redefined Bolívar’s racial iden-
tity, presenting him as mestizo. Decades of genealogical work performed at
the Bolivarian Society to make him into a white patrician figure in the
service of the economic elites was now put to the side if not made to
 7  THE CONSTRUCTION OF A PATRICIAN HERITAGE AND OF CALUMNY…  195

occupy the space of blasphemy for a race-conscious society required now

to accept the official view. Mestizo or white or pardo? Calumniators, beware.
The influence of the society should not be underestimated, though in
the mid-1950s its founder and intellectual force, Lecuna, died, and the
society’s other founder and first post-Gómez president, López Contreras,
was in exile in New  York City along with Betancourt. In 1953 López
Contreras sought to perform the role of the intellectual, drawing on the
cultural capital of the Generación del 28 to present Bolívar as a freethinker
who was not unlike a journalist, an individual who made use of the written
word to affirm his vision.42
The Bolivarian Society’s bulletin came out regularly from July 24,
1939, the date of Bolívar’s birthday, until 1969, starting up again in 1974
after a five-year hiatus. After the free elections that saw Betancourt become
president in 1959, the bulletin, as we have already seen, continued to act
as a clearinghouse of sorts for the Latin American Right. It was an arm of
the Venezuelan state and an extension of US and OAS interests at the
same time that it was a site of important work investigating Bolívar’s let-
ters. For instance, one scholar establishes the existence of a Bolívar letter
stating his desire to take his army to Cuba. The proof was the letter of
reply from Sucre. In the year Betancourt became president, the society
dedicated a beautiful new equestrian statue of Bolívar in Washington,
D.C., the result of its collaboration with the Pérez Jiménez government.
Representing the society was its president, Arturo Uslar Pietri, a major
Venezuelan writer and cultural figure who was the unnamed person of
whom we spoke earlier, the party guilty of imagining Bolívar as riding in
the streets of Bogotá in a landau with Manuela Sáenz. Uslar Pietri per-
formed many official tasks of this kind. One of the most interesting was
the speech he delivered on Bolívar to the Venezuelan congress in 1980.
The occasion was the 150th anniversary of Bolívar’s death. Addressing
white gentleman dressed in black suits with white shirts and thin black ties,
he told Bolívar’s story again, emphasizing his connections to the people and
ending with Bolívar’s exile. Did they know Bolívar died in exile and penni-
less, he asked? The Bolívar cult was speaking morality, as it always had, and
distinguished men in suits who managed the country were listening, as they
had at different moments throughout their lives. With Bolívar as his moral
standard, Uslar Pietri admonished the country for not using its oil revenues
responsibly, for not pursuing the public good, and for having become exces-
sively materialistic. No one was to blame but themselves, as the oil industry
had been nationalized four years earlier, on January 1, 1976.43
196  R. T. CONN

We have seen that the Bolivarian Society promoted sister societies

throughout the world, and as we observed in Chap. 1, in the case of
Cambridge University, encouraged the study of Bolívar in foreign acade-
mies. It also made subventions available to presses for academic books
about Bolívar, including ones to the University of Texas Press, and backed
and collaborated with films. One in particular stands out. This was
Alessandro Blasetti’s 1969 Simón Bolívar, which also received support
from the Venezuelan Government and Armed Forces, the National
Academy of History, and the Ministry of the Treasury.44
The film, which features important Italian and Spanish actors alongside
the US-Austrian actor Maximilian Schell and appears simultaneously in
Spanish, Italian, and English, plugs into the anti-colonial sensibilities of
the 1960s. Circumscribing Bolívar’s acts to Venezuela—with Bolívar never
crossing the Andes or going south—it begins in the moment of 1817, the
year the Third Republic was established and two years after caudillos had
begun to recruit intensely among pardos with the possibility of “military
promotion up to the middle rank of the officer corps.”45
One significant early scene is the January 30, 1818, meeting between
the white peasant José Antonio Páez that Gil Fortoul presents as mestizo
in his 1907 and 1930 histories and that Larrazábal presents as lower-class
white in Cesarismo democrático and who is played by the Spanish actor
Conrado San Martín. The white-gentleman Bolívar is played by Schell.
The two embrace as equals and agree to coordinate their military opera-
tions against Morillo—Bolívar now having under his command Páez’s tre-
mendously effective forces of mixed-race plainsmen. There are several
moments in which Schell’s character expounds on the movement of inde-
pendence, telling the audience that it is not only independence from Spain
that is sought, but also in what he describes as a revolution, equality for all
Venezuelans and along with this freedom for slaves.
Race is fundamental. The film presents a white Bolívar surrounded by
distinctly white generals and advisors leading loyal troops made up of par-
dos. Such a portrayal, we can think, was consistent with the interpretive
line of the Bolivarian Society, which would have been pleased that the
Spanish scriptwriters left out the figure of the pardo leader Manuel Píar,
executed in 1817 by Bolívar, never mind other pardo leaders, and other
controversial moments or questions such as the War to the Death, which
could have been included through flashback; the relationship between
Bolívar and Miranda, which similarly could have been included; and
Bolívar’s precise views on government, particularly his Gran Colombia,
 7  THE CONSTRUCTION OF A PATRICIAN HERITAGE AND OF CALUMNY…  197

Bolivian Constitution, and Andean Federation. For John Lynch, Bolívar’s

decision to turn Francisco de Miranda over to the Spanish authorities is an
act of betrayal that knows no forgiveness.
The film promised to appeal to the intended world audience of white-
liberal Europeans, Latin Americans, and North Americans. That audience
would have supported the emancipation of European-colonized peoples
but would also have been happy to see the case of Latin American inde-
pendence as a struggle of racial and social liberation led by colonial whites.
Further, they would have been pleased to see that it had been successful,
as the film alleges it was.
There is some truth in the army as represented with regard to the sol-
diers. Lynch tells us that Bolívar’s army of individuals of different racial
backgrounds represented his social dream, the world he wanted to bring
into being but that he could not.46 How could one man do that alone, he
asks? Bolívar’s army represented his racial politics; his skin color did not.
The film, then, does mirror at some level the perspective of pardos who, as
we have said, became part of the forces beginning in 1815, but reached
levels in the military hierarchy higher than allowed by the Bolivarian
Society. But we would have to remember that, as we stated earlier with
regard to Lynch’s 1973 and 2006 volumes, they found themselves mar-
ginalized in 1830, facing a reconstructed creole elite that, as seen in the
1830 constitution, exercised its social and economic hegemony through,
among other strategies, electoral voting requirements.47 We would also
need to remember that Bolívar, as we have mentioned earlier and will dis-
cuss in later chapters, executed not only the pardo leader Píar, but also
another pardo war hero. For Lynch, it was the price to pay for unity. For
Aline Helg and others, it was something else.

Notes
1. The scholarship on house museums and/or historic homes is impressive.
See the important work of Patricia West, Domesticating History: the politi-
cal origins of America’s house museums (Washington, DC: Smithsonian
Institution Press, 1999).
2. Vicente Lecuna, Papeles de Bolívar (Madrid: Editorial-America, Biblioteca
Ayacucho Series, 1920).
3. José Gil Fortoul, Historia constitucional de Venezuela. Segunda edición
revisada (Caracas: Parra León Hermanos-Editores, 1930), 673–676.
4. Ibid., 63, 78.
198  R. T. CONN

5. Joaquín Gabaldón Márquez, “Don Vicente Lecuna: Historiador de

Bolívar” (Caracas: Italgráfica, 1930), 8. This is a separata from Boletín de
la Academia de la Historia (No. 212, Oct.–Dec. 1970). “Para llegar al
poder no bastan el talento y las virtudes, se necesitan circunstancias favor-
ables que no siempre favorecen al más digno ni al más útil. Así lo enseña la
historia y debemos conformarnos. Los antiguos representan ciega la
fortuna.”
6. Ibid., 9.
7. Vicente Lecuna, Documentos referentes a la creación de Bolivia. Mandados
a publicar por el gobierno del General Juan Vicente Gómez, con motivo
del centenario de la batalla de Ayacucho, Tomo primero (Caracas:
Litografía del Comercio, 1924).
8. Ewell, Venezuela and the United States: From Monroe’s Hemisphere to
Petroleum’s Empire, 1996, 115–116.
9. Cartas del Libertador, Corregidas Conforme a los Originales. Mandadas a
publicar por el Gobierno de Venezuela presidido por el General J. V. Gómez,
1928–1930, Ed. Vicente Lecuna (Caracas: Lit. y Tip. Del Comercio).
10. Robertson, The American Historical Review, Vol. 37, No. 1 (Oct., 1931),
144–145; Lockey, The Hispanic American Historical Review, Vol. 23, No.
4 (Nov., 1943), 730–732; and Wilgus, The Hispanic American Historical
Review, Vol. 11, No. 2 (May, 1931), 223–227.
11. F. Oliver Brachfeld, “Grafología de la primera carta conocida de Bolívar,”
Revista de la Sociedad Bolivariana de Venezuela, volume 13 issue 38
(1953): 33.
12. Rufino Blanco Fombona, Mocedades de Bólivar (Caracas: Ministerio de
Educación, 1969), 87–88. “Pronto aprenderá. Porque lleva en sí, en ger-
men, el amor a las letras; y posee unos nervios muy vibrantes y finos.”
13. See Tomás Straka, La épica del desencanto: Bolivarianismo, historiografía y
política en Venezuela (Caracas: Editorial Alfa, 2009), 66.
14. Carlos A Villanueva, El imperio de los Andes (París: Librería Paul Ollendorf,
1913).
15. Laureano Vallenilla Lanz, “El Libertador juzgado por los miopes” (Caracas:
Litografía del Comercio, 1914), 6–7.
16. Carlos A Villanueva, El imperio de los Andes (París: Librería Paul Ollendorf,
1913), 132, 130.
17. Laureano Vallenilla Lanz, El Libertador juzgado por los miopes (Caracas:
Litografía y Tipografía del Comercio, 1914), 6–7.
18. José Gil Fortoul, Historia constitucional de Venezuela, Tomo Primero
(Caracas: Parra León Hermanos – Editores, 1930), 291.
76: “Adviértase, también, que los hidalgos aventureros, para quienes no
había regla in medida, saciaban sus ímpetus amorosos con las indias y mes-
tizas y negras y zambas.”
 7  THE CONSTRUCTION OF A PATRICIAN HERITAGE AND OF CALUMNY…  199

77: (“Más tarde, es cosa sabida que una hermana y una sobrina del
Libertador se casaron con pardos.”)
19. Eduardo Colombres Mármol, San Martín y Bolívar en la entrevista de
Guayaquil, a la luz de nuevos documentos, prologue Rómulo D.  Carbia
(Buenos Aires: “Coni,” 1940).
20. See Vicente Dávila, “Dictamen de la Academia Nacional de la Historia de
Venezuela,” in La entrevista de Guayaquil: Reestablecimiento de la verdad
histórica (Caracas: Ediciones del Ministerio de Educación Nacional,
Dirección de Cultura, 1948), 20–43.
21. I owe this citation to Daniel Balderston who uses it in “Behind Closed
Doors: The Guayaquil Meeting and the Silences of History,” which is a
chapter from his book, Out of Context: Historical Reference and the
Representation of Reality (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 123.
22. See Simón Bolívar: Obras completas, Ed. Vicente Lecuna with Esther Barret
de Nazaris, Ministerio de Educación de los Estados Unidos de Venezuela
(La Habana: Editorial Lex, 1947).
23. Germán Carrera Damas, El culto a Bolívar; esbozo para un estudio de la
historia de las ideas en Venezuela (Caracas: Alfadil Ediciones, 2003), 344.
24. Revista de la Sociedad Bolivariana de Venezuela, 1953 volume 13, issue 38.
25. “Cátedra Bolivariana obligatoria en las universidades y planteles de
Colombia,” Revista de la Sociedad Bolivariana de Venezuela, 1953 volume
13, issue 38, 69–71.
26. Germán Arciniegas, “Palabras del embajador de Colombia,” Revista de la
Sociedad Bolivariana de Venezuela, 1969 Volume 19, Issue 98, April 19,
10–18.
27. Joaquín Balaguer, “Bolívar, único prócer americano de estatura universal,”
Revista de la Sociedad Bolivariana de Venezuela, Segunda Etapa, 1974 vol.
xxxi, issue 101, 24–39.
28. J.L.  Salcedo-Bastardo, “La justicia agraria,” Revista de la Sociedad
Bolivariana de Venezuela, 1974 volume 31, issue 101, 99–118.
29. Vicente Lecuna, La Casa Natal del Libertador (Caracas: Imprenta
Nacional, 1954).
30. Salvador de Madariaga, Bolívar (Mexico: Editorial Hermes, 1951).
31. Salvador de Madariaga, Bolívar (Coral Gables, Florida: University of
Miami Press, 1952).
32. Vicente Lecuna, ‘Juicio del profesor Raymond F.  Logan, de Howard
University, sobre la obra calumniosa de Madariaga, titulada “Bolívar,”’
Revista de la Sociedad Bolivariana de Venezuela, 1953 volume 13, issue 39,
109–110.
33. See: “La monarquía de Don Salvador de Madariaga,” (“The Monarchy of
Don Salvador de Madariaga”), signed “El Valijero” (The courrier), February
200  R. T. CONN

22, 1947, from the column, “Fuera de valija” (“Out of the Mailbag”).
http://www.cer vantesvirtual.com/descargaPdf/la-monarquia-de-
dsalvador-de-madariaga-791382/.
34. Marcelle Michelin, “The Madariaga Controversy,” Books Abroad, Autumn
1953 volume 27, issue 4.
35. Salvador de Madariaga, 75.
Also: “There was, therefore, a pure white, Spanish civil war element in
the attitude of Ribas and Bolívar. But there was in it an Indian element as
well: the voice of the depressed and dispossessed men in revolt against the
conquerors and usurpers,” 184.
36. Ibid., 75.
37. Ibid., 77.
38. Daniel Valois Arce, “Historia y fábula,” Revista de la Sociedad Bolivariana
de Venezuela, 1953 volume 13, issue 39, 131–135.
39. Leonardo Altuve Carillo, “Amores profanos y divinos de Simón Bolívar” in
Visión diversa de Bolívar: ciclo de charlas en homenaje al Libertador con
motivo del año bicentario de su natalacio, 1783–1883 (Caracas: Petroquímica
de Venezuela, 1983), 188.
40. Denzil Romero, La esposa del doctor Thorne (Barcelona: Tusquets
Editores, 1990).
41. Ibid., 9–10.
42. Eleazar López Contreras, “Simón Bolívar, escritor, crítico y periodista,”
Revista de la Sociedad Bolivariana de Venezuela, 1953 volume 13, issue 38,
21–26.
43. Arturo Uslar Pietri, Arturo, Discurso pronuniciado en la Sesión Solemne
del Congreso de la República con motivo del Sesquicentenario de la
Muerte del Libertador Simón Bolívar, Padre de la Patria (Caracas:
Venezuela, 1981).
44. Alessandro Blasetti, dir., Simón Bolívar (Co-production Spain-Italy-
Venezuela; PEFSA/Finarco/Juppiter/Tamanaco Films, 1969). [Caracas:
International Film Company (IFC)].
45. John Lynch, The Spanish American Revolutions, 1808–1826 (New York:
W.W. Norton and Co., 1973), 226.
46. John Lynch, Simón Bolívar: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2006), 292.
47. John Lynch, The Spanish American Revolutions, 1808–1826 (New York:
W.W. Norton and Co., 1973), 227.
 CHAPTER 8

Revising the Bolivarian Machine:

A Venezuela Reclaimed by New Intellectuals

Competing with the Bolivarian Society from its inception was the writer
Mariano Picón Salas, the most important figure of the times after Lecuna
to redirect the Bolivarian machine. Returning to Venezuela in 1936, Picón
Salas, who had established himself as an essayist in Chile, where he went in
the early 1920s for economic reasons, wasted no time in seeking to reor-
ganize knowledge production. In 1936, he established the Organización
Revolucionaria Venezolana (Venezuelan Revolutionary Organization) and
the Instituto Nacional Pedagógico (National Pedagogic Institute), and
from 1938 to 1940, he was the director of Culture and Fine Arts for the
Education Ministry. Later, in 1950, he founded the Division of Humanities
and Education at the Central University of Venezuela. In addition to these
leadership roles in the new sphere of Venezuelan culture, he was the
ambassador at different times to Colombia, Brazil, and the United Nations
Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Between
1963 and 1964, he was the secretary to President Rómulo Betancourt.
Throughout the decades after his return, he submitted the country to a
new national project defined by the critical reason of Enlightenment with
the humanities at the center of that project. By the humanities, he meant
the fields of literature, the arts, history, philosophy, and sociology, fields
that needed to be organized and defined in Venezuela so that Venezuelans
could study their past. It was a matter of beginning anew, of reimagining
Venezuelan history such as to reshape it, the present a tabula rasa upon

© The Author(s) 2020 201

R. T. Conn, Bolívar’s Afterlife in the Americas,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26218-1_8
202  R. T. CONN

which to build a democratic world within a liberal capitalist framework.

O’Leary and Lecuna provided Picón Salas, in a sense, with that beginning,
which was liberal.
In his 1940 Pequeño tratado de la tradición (Small Treatise on
Tradition), a key text for understanding his project, Picón Salas declares
that given the chronological and documentary history of Bolívar having
been realized in exemplary fashion by scholars extending from O’Leary to
Lecuna, it was time for a new type of history. That history, he asserted,
would liberate Bolívar from the “proliferating uses and abuses of his
figure.”1 Picón Sales wanted to overcome 110 years of Bolivarian discourse
in Venezuela.
He targets military leaders in the nineteenth century who issued pro-
nouncements in his name. He also speaks of local knowledge of his figure,
stating that so much of what has been said about Bolívar up to that
moment is folkloric, pedestrian, vain, or simply lowly. “In general,” he
writes, “(even though to say so may hurt our native vanity) Bolívar is still
without an interpretive History of the kind that lives up to his name in the
way those of Caesar or perhaps of Napoleon do.”2
To create a framework for his new interpretive history that will be wor-
thy of Bolívar and that will allow Venezuelans to start over, Picón Salas
calls upon cultural and historical models dominant in the moment, includ-
ing the omnipresent nineteenth-century German humanist Goethe,
German historian Oswald Spengler, Spanish philosopher José Ortega y
Gasset, and English historian and philosopher Arnold Toynbee. Spengler
and Toynbee were the two historians who modeled the interpretive his-
tory that Picón Salas is drawing on for his project. Their histories were
comparative, spanning cultures and civilizations with forms and symbols
identified to link them. All are figures who understand culture as having a
central role to play in the development of the nation state and who, fur-
ther, conceive of history in terms of the battle between civilization and
barbarism. Armed with this new canon of authors that no one else had
brought to bear on Venezuela, Picón Salas places Bolívar as one among a
series of figures in a Eurocentric story dating back to Columbus. But he is
not the military leader. In his interpretive history, Picón Salas has taken
Bolívar off the battlefield—the military epic of little interest—to insert
him in the world of ideas and of culture that he is constructing for the
modern Venezuela he imagines. Bolívar represents the Enlightenment,
the intellectual movement from which he drew in his writings, just as
Jean-­Jacques Rousseau (Genevan), Adam Smith (Scottish), and Gaspar
 8  REVISING THE BOLIVARIAN MACHINE: A VENEZUELA RECLAIMED…  203

Melchor de Jovellanos (Spanish) do. Here is the broad outline of the his-
tory he is openly fashioning through the major intellectual models of the
times. Bolívar now belongs to intellectual history. The stances he took in
his individual writings on questions of race, social class, government, and
Spain are elided.
How he adapts for his own purposes Bolívar’s 1812 Cartagena
Manifesto, so important in the Venezuelan tradition, is of great interest.
Forget the main goal of the text, to rally the support of Cartagena for a
joint military operation—the constitution of 1811 said by Bolívar to be
the reason the republic failed—Picón Salas speaks of Bolívar in relation-
ship to the fraught category of ideology of the 1920s and 1930s, bringing
him forth through a twentieth-century lens. “Already in his youthful
Cartagena Manifesto,” he writes, “he could be seen to have freed the
Venezuelan Revolution of the primitive ideological ‘impasse’ into which it
had fallen, of the cult of abstract ideas, to define the phenomenon before
him in its particularity.”3
Picón Salas will, he hopes, similarly cut through the morass of ideas he
encounters in Caracas just as Bolívar did when he sought to explain why
the First Republic fell. A country, we are told, without a cultural project,
it had been at the mercy of Gómez, his inner circle of intellectual admin-
istrators, and US and other international oil companies. No longer will an
oil city like Houston, be the model for Venezuela, nor will Venezuelans
conceive of themselves as part of a predetermined history justifying
authoritarian government. No longer, moreover, will they see themselves
through the prism of the logic of independence that resulted in caudillos
collaborating with urban elites, the two using each other to secure advan-
tage for themselves. There is a path forward that will break the primitive
impasse. That path is Western culture, with the humanities—literature, the
arts, history, and philosophy—leading the way and with Spanish culture an
important component of the Western canon.
At the center of what Picón Salas is imagining is the individual, a cat-
egory that was fundamental to nineteenth-century liberalism but that
had been annihilated under the force of positivist sociology. For him the
humanities, which he also presents through the European philosophical
movement known as vitalism, will be synonymous with that historical
subject. He invents for this new concept of the individual, a cultural
identity for Venezuelans that he hopes will become mythic, analogous to
the US pioneer or Adam Smith’s individual initiative. What Picón Salas
comes up with is the idea of the person who undertakes what he calls
204  R. T. CONN

adventure and that is reflected in an archetype he creates for Venezuelans

using Spanish literature: Miguel de Cervantes’s eponymous character of
El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha (Don Quixote).4 For Picón
Salas, for whom literature occupies a central role in the humanities, there
could be no greater symbol of his vision than this famous literary char-
acter.5 Furthermore, he would bring Spanish and Latin American let-
ters together.
As no Venezuelan ever had or perhaps ever would, Picón Salas uses
Latin America’s long-established cultural nationalist tradition to his
advantage for the purposes of his humanities project. That hemispheric
tradition goes from Bolívar to the Argentine Domingo Faustino
Sarmiento, to the Cuban José Martí and the Uruguayan José Enrique
Rodó, and to the Mexicans Alfonso Reyes and José Vasconcelos, the para-
digms of Reyes and Vasconcelos dominant in the moment. Invented and
reinvented, the tradition is now dispersed across different national and
academic spheres, used by an array of actors to position themselves. Picón
Salas expands and democratizes it, performing new readings of figures like
Rodó and adding Venezuelan figures such as Cecilio Acosta, whom he
pairs with Martí who, as we know, wrote an important essay about Acosta
in 1881, and who became famous, a foundation of the tradition Picón
Salas is remaking in dialogue with Venezuelan letters. Merging the Bolívar
of that tradition with his new universal Bolívar who stands above the fig-
ure spoken by nineteenth-century caudillos and military people and
remembered by the proverbial grandfather who fought at Carabobo or
Boyacá or in Alto Peru, and on the shoulders of O’Leary and Lecuna, he
retells the history of Venezuela such as to place it squarely in relation to
the histories of nation states in Latin America, Europe, and North
America.6 His recovered Bolívar will be a platform for a new comparative
understanding of history and culture with the Venezuelan context alone
now insufficient for knowledge production. In “Problemática de la histo-
ria común” (“The Problematic of a Common History”), he asks that
Venezuela’s nineteenth-­century civil wars be seen as part of the same phe-
nomenon as those of other countries in Latin America.7 The conflict
between federalism and centralism could already be observed, he affirms,
in the moment of the 1811 constitution and the First Republic.
Comparison allowed him the possibility of critique. Venezuela, Picón
Salas declares, has failed miserably at creating opportunities for its
citizenry—previous power groups serving only themselves and their
clienteles—with so-called modernizers who return from exile not succeed-
 8  REVISING THE BOLIVARIAN MACHINE: A VENEZUELA RECLAIMED…  205

ing, unable to conceive of projects that meet the needs of all Venezuelans.
Most guilty for the reason that he was so capable and such a key historical
figure is Antonio Guzmán Blanco, the great modernizer, who, he tells us,
wasted the opportunity he had during his time in office to do what other
leaders in the Americas did—encourage European immigration and create
an administrative apparatus to incorporate the rural masses that had
become a part of national culture after the Guerra Federal.8
In his critique of Guzmán Blanco, Picón Salas also states that he should
have spent less time in Europe and attended more to the primary schools
he created, schools that, contrary to what was said about him and his
administration, were not successful. The bottom line, he concludes, after
reassessing the leader in order to open a space for his own vision, is that
when considering the entire Venezuelan population and the conditions of
the institutions necessary to serve it, Venezuela is behind other countries.
To compare its public education system to those of Chile and Argentina is
to see that Venezuela has still not accomplished what Chileans and
Argentines realized in the nineteenth century. To compare it to that of
Bolivia is to see that Venezuela is where Bolivia was in 1912.9 To progress,
Venezuela must not only act, it must also select the proper educational
model. That model, Picón Salas tells us with no small amount of dramat-
ics, should be based not on the ideas of the eminent writer Juan Vicente
González, who in 1865, just after the Guerra Federal, looks back with
nostalgia on the aristocratic cultural world that once was, but instead on
those of Cecilio Acosta who between 1860 and 1880 sees the need for a
new democratic culture, a new modern humanism:

Venezuela was also the desert and the men of the desert, anxious to express
themselves, whose caudillo and prophet was Ezequiel Zamora. But, as it
turned out, that education of the kind for the intellectual “elites” (education
in Latin and Roman Law of our first public men) was not replaced by a
democratic Education, by the “modern humanism” of which Cecilio Acosta
dreamed.10

But in other respects, Venezuela, Picón Salas tells us, was not behind
other countries. For if there was war in the nineteenth century, there was
an unintended consequence. The historical process, he asserts, leveled and
united Venezuelan society. He begins with the so-called exodus from
Caracas in 1814 that saw divisions between masters and slaves or servants
breakdown and the mixing of peoples from different races and social classes,
and Bolívar himself moving between different regions of Venezuela.11
206  R. T. CONN

From that moment through the beginning of the Venezuelan state in 1830,
and then through the Guerra Federal of 1859–1863, what is significant is
that in Venezuela the old colonial social order disintegrated and a new one,
though still unorganized, came into being.
Picón Salas is drawing upon José Gil Fortoul’s periodization of the
century given his 1907 volume. For Gil Fortoul, Venezuela’s legitimate
republican tradition is sundered by José Tadeo Monagas and never prop-
erly transcended, the country falling into federalism and requiring the
leadership of one such as Juan Vicente Gómez to set it back on course.
Laying over that period the narrative of civilization and barbarism that he
borrows from the Argentine tradition that he knew so well—this narrative
a key interpretive framework for Argentine cultural actors—and from the
European cultural historians whom we have named, Picón Salas speaks of
what he calls the Páez period. He asserts that this period signifies civiliza-
tion, and that all that comes afterwards represents barbarism: from the
Monagas brothers and Falcón to Guzmán Blanco and Gómez, figures who
are interested only in their own power and who deploy culture to that end.
All is not lost, though. The movement of people from the countryside
to the city during the Guerra Federal, decades after the 1814 exodus from
Caracas that created the beginnings of Venezuelan consciousness, had
produced among Venezuelans a strong belief in equality. Antonio Guzmán
Blanco had missed an opportunity to lead a nation ready to be organized
and uplifted. Instead, Francophile and dictator that he was, he did no
more than produce in Caracas his own version of France’s Second
Empire.12 This was not what Venezuela needed.
Venezuela will not miss another opportunity. Picón Sales is construct-
ing an intellectual tradition around Bolívar in the context of a transatlantic
world defined by the circulation of ideas. He is also constructing that tra-
dition around Francisco de Miranda. Indeed, Miranda was now available
more than ever to deploy in his Enlightenment narrative. This was in part
thanks to historian and former Gómez diplomat Caracciolo Parra Pérez,
who had made sustained efforts to acquire the Miranda Archive from
Colombia, where it had resided. It was also due to developments in the
United States where Miranda was being celebrated by historians. Parra
Pérez brought the archive back with him to Venezuela subsequent to
Gómez’s death, giving it to Vicente Lecuna.
But he returned not only with a reservoir of documents, but also a draft
for a new book based on those documents and that he published in 1939
under the title Historia de la primera república de Venezuela (A History of
 8  REVISING THE BOLIVARIAN MACHINE: A VENEZUELA RECLAIMED…  207

the First Republic of Venezuela). In this book, which he offered to the

­public as both a new reading of Miranda and of the First Republic, Parra
Pérez disputes the positivist claims of Gil Fortoul and Vallenilla Lanz by
using Miranda’s letters and documents to tell a different story.
Through his reading of them, Parra Pérez demonstrates that Miranda
was not the person with fanciful ideas drawn by Gil Fortoul but rather an
individual who carefully considered the many political voices from the dif-
ferent sectors of the society at the time, both from Caracas and from the
regional cities. Having the position of representative of a Venezuelan town
(deputy), he took that political responsibility seriously, Parra Pérez insists.
He traveled to see his constituents and returned to express and defend their
views, not cover them over. For Parra Pérez, the history of the First Republic
is not, then, that of legislators who do the bidding only of the oligarchy (Gil
Fortoul) and certainly not that of figures who act illegally (Vallenilla Lanz).
The fear of anarchy, Parra Pérez asserts by referring to the category of dis-
order deployed by Vallenilla Lanz, was real. But the cause he proposes is
different from that alleged by Vallenilla Lanz. The confusion of the moment
is not inevitable, hardly the result of a biological and cultural instinct push-
ing the country to organize in municipalities, but more simply, and, to be
sure, positively, the salutary consequence of the diversity of political voices
that existed. As for the regional elites? Parra Pérez states that their distrust
of Caracas was based not only on their concern with maintaining local
autonomy. The Reign of Terror from 1793 to 1794, carried out by France’s
National Assembly, had taught them to be suspicious of central govern-
ment. For this reason, they challenged the authority of the Caracas national
deputies. They did not do so only to hold on to the regional prerogatives
they had long enjoyed under the colonial state. As for the meaning of the
declaration of the confederated states? This was an example of democracy in
action with empowered elites seeking to accommodate less empowered
ones. Parra Pérez provides a vision of Miranda and the First Republic that
could take the place of Vallenilla Lanz’s and Gil Fortoul’s historicist, anti-
republican visions, using his letters to offer lessons on the practice of democ-
racy for the post-­Gómez future.13
With the likes of Parra Pérez by his side, Picón Salas moves forward,
showing the presence of European Enlightenment texts in Latin America,
specifically the all-important Declaration of the Rights of Man that was so
central to the early leaders of independence, imprisoned, exiled, or cut
down by the Spanish—the text that was famously translated into Spanish
and printed by the New Granadan intellectual Antonio Nariño. As for
208  R. T. CONN

Spain, the country against which Bolívar fought and railed and which
Latin American intellectuals had been tapping for cultural models particu-
larly since 1898, Picón Salas illuminates the geographic and cultural limits
of the hermeneutic he fashions. In relation to the matter of twentieth-­
century reflections on labor and capital, he introduces his readers to the
work of the Spanish friar and writer Benito Jerónimo Feijoó, presenting
his critiques of nobiliary land rights in the Spain of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries as certain to resonate with a Latin American audience
that will find in them much to explain class relations in their respective
countries, more appropriate for Latin America, Picón Salas proposes, than
the writings of Marx.
Picón Salas never stopped seeking to marginalize Venezuelan commu-
nism both by explicitly saying no to it and by constructing a vision of
national culture that carefully set forth the proper terms of social critique.
Beginning with Venezuelan intellectuals like Gustavo Machado who par-
ticipated in the founding of the Anti-Imperialist League in Mexico City in
1925, communism played a major role in the Venezuela of his times.
Founded in 1931 and including both Venezuelans and non-Venezuelans,
the Communist Party was banned by López Contreras in his 1936 consti-
tution and later returned to legality in 1945 before again being declared
illegal in 1950. In 1958, the party regained legality but was excluded from
the Puntofijo Pact of 1958 that Acción Democrática (AD), the Comité de
Organización Política Electoral Independiente (COPEI: Committee for
an Independent Electoral Political Organization), and the Unión
Republicana Democrática (URD: The Democratic Republican Union)
made for sharing power in the new liberal order to follow Pérez Jiménez,
an agreement that included the sharing of oil wealth.
The Venezuelan communist party contested the US-Venezuelan alli-
ance constructed around the oil industry of which we have spoken,
opposed dictatorship, and in the all-important moment of the 1948 presi-
dential elections supported the writer Rómulo Gallegos. When a military
coup removed Gallegos from office nine months after the elections, send-
ing him and a Betancourt who now stood for civilian government into
exile, Picón Salas, who like the greater part of the Venezuelan intelligen-
tsia backed this writer turned president, resigned from his position as
ambassador to Colombia. He had seen in 1948 the rise and demise of a
democratic structure in Venezuela, and in Colombia, with the assassina-
tion of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán on April 9, the end of a liberal, democratic
tradition that had been building for 18 years.
 8  REVISING THE BOLIVARIAN MACHINE: A VENEZUELA RECLAIMED…  209

The humanities as he imagined them, Cecilio Acosta an inspiration,

were still the answer. One modern development in the world of ideas that
was of significance for writers across Europe and also in Mexico and that
we referred to earlier deserves our attention. This is vitalism. In the con-
text of his Western-­canon project, Picón Salas gives particular importance
to it. This movement, which was based on the writings of the German
philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, took different forms across the countries
of Europe and in Latin America. It stood against the determinism of the
nineteenth century, articulating a new vision of freedom and autonomy
for the human subject. Affiliating himself with it, he cites in particular the
work of the Spanish thinker who articulated the movement for Spain in
the 1920s and 1930s, José Ortega y Gasset. Ortega y Gassett speaks of
historical change as consciousness of one’s temporal condition, articulat-
ing a vision critical of determinism as he seeks to import new ideas into his
country. In his 1930 La rebelión de las masses (The Revolt of the Masses), he
calls for the construction of a meritocratic order based on the labor or
effort of individuals at the same time that he critiques European fascism.
Picón Salas also cites the movement’s foundational figure, Nietzsche, who
writes of moving beyond national models, in his case German, to embrace
Western culture and values affirmative of life.
On the authority of ideas linked to vitalism, Picón Salas builds a new
canon of Venezuelan and Spanish writers and intellectuals, presenting
them as being relevant for the present on account of their vitalist sensibili-
ties. They include artists as well. With vitalism as his criterion of selection,
he lifts from the past figures who, he believes, speak with particular force
to the present. He creates for Venezuela an intellectual tradition at the
same time that he seeks to overcome the Venezuelan intellectual figures of
the previous generation.
The one aim could not be separated from the other. That meant re-­
creating the past. But it also meant re-creating disciplines. The field of
literature was not an issue for him, as there was no strong tradition to
redirect. Sociology was an entirely different story, more challenging, as he
had to deal with Gil Fortoul and Vallenilla Lanz, the two arguably provid-
ing one of the motivations for his humanities project in the first place.
As for sociology, the basis of Gil Fortoul’s and Vallenilla Lanz’s defense
of a regime, Picón Salas undertook to redefine the limits of that field. In
several instances in his essays, he celebrates the work of the US American
Thorstein Veblen, best known for his 1899 book titled The Theory of the
Leisure Class, which studies how the wealthy use leisure and its signs for
210  R. T. CONN

cultural capital.14 Also seizing his attention is the Uruguayan José Enrique
Rodó’s famous 1900 book Ariel. Rodó is a key figure for him to engage
with as Ariel was at the historical moment still a fulcrum for the hemi-
spheric cultural tradition he is adapting. He highlights certain parts of the
text, speaking of the section in which Rodó focuses on the Gilded Age of
the United States, critiquing the country’s materialistic excesses and posit-
ing that the period represents a moment of decadence for the United
States in comparison to the country’s foundational moments a century
earlier in Boston.15 But he also finds fault with Rodó, who was interesting
for his time, he says, but who used his critique of capitalism to argue for
the need for Latin American literary elites to filter and contain modernity
for their societies. In the new historical movement, he declares, an elite of
that kind has no place. It is completely outdated.16 Still, Rodó remains a
usable figure for him, inasmuch as he, like Veblen, bring to public and
academic discourse a vision of sociology based on the category of the state
and evolution in the context of capitalism and republican government.
Their models provide examples of critical analysis that focuses on how
inequality and social class differentiation operate from within that context.
They can appeal to socially engaged people committed to the empower-
ment of a critical reason based on the individual. But the literary elite of
which Rodó speaks in 1900 must be reformed. Venezuelans and Latin
Americans more broadly need to create more democratic critical para-
digms for the analysis of capitalism and culture.
Picón Salas tells of his memories of listening to the conferences of
Vallenilla Lanz, conferences, though, that he does not challenge, indicat-
ing that the thought of this figure and that of the other intellectuals associ-
ated with him reflected the social and political reality of the moment. In
this way, he confers upon Vallenilla Lanz’s intellectual production a role in
the development of Venezuela, but with the particular goal of making a
place in the national narrative for his own project: he says that the country
is now ready for growth and transformation—the future possibilities that
his cultural model now allows.17 At the same time, Picón Salas, in the
other places in his vast essayistic production, expresses horror at what
Gómez and his intellectual administrators did: create the fiction that the
Venezuelan citizenry could not receive the jolt of modernity, that its path
was one of stasis, with the country’s citizens unable to free themselves of
the cultural patterns they purportedly inherited from Spain, the colonial
period, and the wars of independence. But it was not only Venezuelan
positivism, namely the work of Gil Fortoul and Vallenilla Lanz, with which
 8  REVISING THE BOLIVARIAN MACHINE: A VENEZUELA RECLAIMED…  211

he is battling. Communism, as we have seen, is his other concern as he

constructs the humanities as a cultural paradigm. The vitalist movement
comes in handy. He states that on a global level, it has transcended Marx’s
vision of economic determinism. With this, Picón Salas can, once again,
think he has pierced the morass of his times, as Bolívar did in the Cartagena
Manifesto.
Venezuela’s modernity would be based both upon the Western
tradition—Latin America and Spain included—and a new capitalistic spirit
forged by Venezuelans energized by the humanities. Those capitalist spir-
its would be builders of new enterprises, of new businesses, with one of
their missions being to offset the influence of oil.
On January 15, 1958, Picón Salas oversaw the publication of “Manifiesto
de los intelectuales sobre la situación politica nacional” (“Manifesto by
Intellectuals on the National Political Situation”), a public statement from
intellectuals and military leaders demanding that Pérez Jiménez resign.
He was standing up to power in the way the nineteenth-century figures of
whom he spoke had. On January 23, the military led a coup. The return
of Venezuelan intellectuals and politicians, most importantly Rómulo
Betancourt, followed, along with the Puntofijo Pact of 1958 and the free
elections of 1959.
For Betancourt, the Pérez Jiménez years had been his third exile. His
first followed the 1928 Gómez crackdown; the second his expulsion at the
hands of López Contreras for his communist views; and his third, at the
time of the military coup against Gallegos. With Betancourt now in the
presidency and himself ambassador to the UNESCO, Picón Salas in the
early 1960s muses about the connections between the state and the
Venezuelan citizenry. Reflecting on the end of the Gómez regime in 1935,
he contends that the regime’s effects on the citizenry were in fact ephem-
eral, the citizenry having a natural civic disposition. The proof of this was
that the groups and institutions of society, including those of the working
class, moved forward by conducting themselves peacefully.18 It was a for-
mulation not dissimilar to that of the Argentine intellectual Domingo
Faustino Sarmiento who, writing from exile in the 1840s, asserts that in
the future, after the defeat of his enemy, the leader Juan Manuel Rosas, the
Argentine civic body would immediately reconstitute itself just as the
French evidently did after The Reign of Terror.
But at this time, Picón Salas was more resolute than ever. He had been
fighting for the minds and souls of the Venezuelan people, a people that
to his mind had rejected modernity since the days of Francisco Miranda
who with British support sought to bring about a revolution in 1806, but
212  R. T. CONN

whom royalist creoles in the northwestern province of Coro turned away.

Was he like Miranda and all those who had followed him with their visions
of modernity? Or had he conceived of a project that would be accepted?
Venezuela was an opaque cultural world that required intellectuals strong
enough to lead without always having the support of the masses, and able
to see their common interests above and beyond ideology, as he said in an
essay, “Regreso y promisión” (“Return and Promise”), from his 1959
work Regreso de tres mundos: un hombre en su generación (Return From
Three Worlds: A Man in His Generation).19 That essay expressed the spirit
of the 1958 Puntofijo Pact.
For this intellectual who was widely read in the Americas of his times,
who brilliantly channeled into Venezuela the new cultural models he came
upon in his readings and when abroad, popular education remained of
utmost importance. Picón Salas saw the immigration of more than a mil-
lion Europeans to Venezuela in the 1950s, after Venezuelan leaders had
not allowed immigration previous to World War II, not wanting individu-
als of Jewish descent or Left-leaning refugees from the Spanish Civil War.
He subscribed to the idea of immigration as meaning modernity and mix-
ing of races. He also saw the new urban Caracas, the city that Pérez
Jiménez built anew by pouring oil money into highways, shopping cen-
ters, and hotels. But Venezuela remained for Picón Salas a country that
had a lot to accomplish, a people who had been betrayed by the govern-
ment, an economic and educational infrastructure still not created. High
Culture as conceived by Rodó and many others was hardly enough.
Finally, to return to Bolívar, Picón Salas had managed to place him in
something called universal history, with his figure now located next to
Rousseau and Montesquieu in one single tradition of thought. Rousseau’s
concept of education, as Picón Salas understood it, had no place. It was
elitist. As for what Bolívar himself did with the ideas of those two figures,
that was of less interest to him than that they were similar. Such a recon-
struction of Bolívar is certainly worthy, though to understand it one needs
to take into consideration those he is seeking to overcome. Picón Salas
invented a new cosmopolitan vision of culture for Venezuela using Bolívar,
Cecilio Acosta, José Martí, and others. It was a rigorous and compelling
vision that appealed to readers across the Americas, readers who were able
to see national histories side by side, learn about major figures and events,
and also gain exposure to modern intellectual history. The effect of his
comparative framework was one of simultaneity over space and time. To
 8  REVISING THE BOLIVARIAN MACHINE: A VENEZUELA RECLAIMED…  213

read about Venezuela’s nineteenth-century civil wars, as we have said, was

also to read about those of Argentina and Mexico.
Picón Salas had placed Venezuela in the Latin American and European
tradition. He had both celebrated Lecuna and upstaged him, the Bolivarian
Society invisible on the new cultural and political map he drew. Venezuelan
intellectual history did not descend from an historic home or house
museum. But exactly in what direction had the pendulum swung?
Others engaged with the Bolívar machine were using new critical
terms as well.
The most important person to do so was historian Germán Carrera
Damas who with his 1969 work, El culto a Bolívar (The Cult of Bolívar),
undertook to tell the history of the machine itself, showing how it came
into being and how it gained strength with each official act and new
administration. The late 1960s was the height of Venezuelan liberalism,
the country having put itself on a new footing with the Puntofijo Pact, the
1959 free elections won by Betancourt, and the successful extradition of
Pérez Jimenez from the United States on charges of peculation. The time
was also one of revolutionary and transformational thinking throughout
Europe and the Americas. Drawing on a mix of categories taken from
social theory, psychology, semiotics, and religious studies, Carrera Damas,
who was shocked that his colleagues in the Venezuelan intelligentsia would
continue to use Bolívar in public discourse subsequent to 1959—this after
the military Bolivarian pomp and ceremony to which they were subjected
in the 1950s and with the right now, after 130 years of oligarchies, author-
itarianism, civil war, insurrections, exile, and violent repression, to enjoy
free speech—sought to rid the Venezuelan public sphere entirely of both
Bolívar’s figure and what he saw as Venezuela’s empty literary and intel-
lectual tradition of futurity, both impediments to democratic and respon-
sible discourse. He was attacking the military for its authoritarian use of
his figure, but he was also, most importantly, going after the Venezuelan
intelligentsia.
To this end, he named, as we saw in Chap. 1, three major institutions
that served as a basis for the promotion and ideological manipulation of
his figure: first, the National Academy of History, founded in 1888; sec-
ond the Bolivarian Society of Venezuela, established in 1937; and third,
the field of study at the Central University of Caracas called Pensamiento
Social del Libertador (Social Thought of the Liberator) constructed by
214  R. T. CONN

José Luis Salcedo-Bastardo between 1953 and 1956.20 What was impor-
tant to Carrera Damas was less to state the terms of individual projects of
Venezuelans than to make visible the conditions of discourse in which they
have flourished and that have permitted the tradition to move from one
administration to the next. Almost everything was listed. There were the
Exequias of Juan Vicente González extolling Bolívar as Venezuela’s father
of the patria, and Larrazábal’s two-volume epistolary history. There were
Bolívar’s letters and political documents, prepared by the Liberator’s aide
de camp Daniel Florencio O’Leary and later, subsequent to his death, by
his son, Simón Bolívar O’Leary, and published in the 1880s by order of
the president Antonio Guzmán Blanco, the president’s name plastered, as
we said earlier, on the title page of each of the 26 volumes. There was also
the bolívar currency, created by Guzmán Blanco to take the place of the
venezolano.
But Carrera Damas, true to the Nietzschean spirit behind his quest to
reveal the origins of the ideas and concepts that Venezuelans have natural-
ized, seeks to find a moment previous to the top-down story he tells of
Venezuelan letters from the perspective of the cult, declaring that the cul-
tural work of the foundational figures of Juan Vicente González and Felipe
Larrazábal does not explain it:

The invocation of literary romanticism, transposed onto historiography by

writers who were more this than historians, has traditionally served to
explain this process, at least in its beginnings. To the Romantic exaltation of
Felipe Larrazábal and Juan Vicente González is attributed in a fundamental
way the creation of the Cult of Bolívar.21

What explains the genesis of the cult of Bolívar if not the written figure
as produced by the likes of Larrazábal and González? This is something at
a deeper level, something in the national psychology, submits Carrera
Damas. If political actors in the nineteenth century looked to Bolívar to
overcome the crisis of civil war and failed institutions, they did so just as
others in other national traditions who looked to the discourse of progress
did, with their all-encompassing, deterministic narratives centered on the
promise of redemption in the future, narratives that contributed, as far as
Carrera Damas is concerned, to the idea of the paternalistic state. Here
was an interesting move in his argument, for Carrera Damas now asserts
that the Bolívar cult he is defining had no content in and of itself, being a
symptom, specifically of a people who surrender their ­reason, not accept-
 8  REVISING THE BOLIVARIAN MACHINE: A VENEZUELA RECLAIMED…  215

ing responsibility for their acts and seeking refuge in narratives of causality
that relieve them of having to account for their own agency. When, for
instance, in the 1830s writers attribute the contemporary economic crisis
to the apparent squandering of loans from the British during the period of
the Gran Colombia, we are told that this is an example of a collective con-
tinuing to use the historical past in a deterministic fashion with the gesta
(heroic deed) of independence now being held responsible for ills for
which the Spanish empire was once held.
The past is the issue. As far as Carrera Damas is concerned, recalling it
has no positive ethical function, in fact, attending to it is a form of decep-
tion that keeps the populace from examining that which is immediate and
present, from seeing the acts of contemporary leaders for what they are.
The cult of Bolívar responds, then, not so much to the interest generated
by Bolívar himself as to a national need, one that Carrera Damas sees as
infantile and as extending into the present.
But if Carrera Damas speaks of a nation’s deep-rooted psychological
condition and the need to break with it, he also explains the genesis of the
Bolívar icon. The beginnings of its emergence are to be found, he asserts,
not in the work of González or Larrazábal or for that matter the state
project of Antonio Guzmán Blanco but in the first years of the new repub-
lic as symbolized by 1842, the moment Bolívar’s remains are returned to
Caracas and celebrated. Two groups were behind the “restoration,” hav-
ing prepared the way for it in the 1830s, he states—the commercial and
landowning bourgeoisie, with returning royalist creoles joining it, and the
new figure of the caudillo—all who turned to Bolívar to legitimize them-
selves before both one another and the masses, recognizing the degree to
which the popular classes over whom Bolívar had exercised authority for
so long identified with his figure, and the potential for using that fact to
their advantage.22
Bolívar goes from a symbol who belongs primarily to the masses to one
who also belongs to the elites, the latter who, having rejected both him
and his vision of the Gran Colombia, now exploit the masses’ identifica-
tion with his figure for the purposes of establishing and maintaining their
hegemony—a popular figure used as the foundation for an anti-populist
social and political structure.23
“All the governments, all the governors, have used and abused this
popular sentiment, anchoring their politics in it or using that sentiment to
derive something of prestige to give a sheen of importance to their other-
wise lackluster policies.”24 One scene from Bolívar’s life and career
216  R. T. CONN

r­ esignified in this context, Carrera Damas tells, is that of his fraught final
months in exile, now constructed to serve as testimony to a hero’s deter-
mination to continue in the face of terrible odds, a lesson of self-sacrifice
and endurance for “citizens” to follow in moments of economic difficulty.
The will to hegemony by the elites together with the alleged psychological
conditions of a people are, in this way, offered as explanations for
Venezuela’s long history of venerating his figure.
The philosopher Luis Castro Leiva is the last figure we shall consider.
An academic like others we have discussed, Castro Leiva set out to create
a new way of talking about ideas in the public sphere in Venezuela. He did
this during the long period of the Puntofijo Pact that came to an end on
December 6, 1998, with the election of Hugo Chávez, an election that
many of Chávez’s supporters in the middle classes thought would result in
a political world no longer dominated by the single bloc party structure.
Castro Leiva, who died the following year, in the previous decades
attacked the nation’s Bolivarian tradition and its managers: the nation’s
official historiography and the military.25 He did so by making Bolívar’s
canonical texts speak in a new fashion. If Picón Salas invited his audiences
to read widely and place themselves in the broader Latin American tradi-
tion by providing brilliant short narratives connecting historical processes
across the Americas, narratives that should be read, if Carrera Damas went
after Venezuela’s intellectuals, telling them to produce a new political lan-
guage, Castro Leiva asked that his audience become students of political
philosophy, of things like first principles and Rousseau’s general will so
that they could critique them. His target was not only Bolívar but the
Enlightenment tradition in which Bolívar conceived of his ideas. He, too,
wanted a new political language.
Elegantly pushing his arguments, Castro Leiva performs nuanced read-
ings of Bolívar’s writings, claiming to do so in the light of the totality of
concepts and sources from the Enlightenment that Bolívar had before
him—those belonging to Rousseau, Montesquieu, and Voltaire—while
also problematizing those same concepts and sources and doing so with a
view to recovering the agency of other Venezuelan political actors. From
within the field of philosophy, Castro Leiva is answering Carrera Damas’s
call for serious contextual work on the topic of the historical Bolívar.26
The Enlightenment text to which he dedicates much of his attention is
Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Social Contract. He describes it as the urtext
behind Bolívar’s Bolivian Constitution. As we have seen, Bolívar’s inter-
preters have positioned his figure in connection to Rousseau in various
 8  REVISING THE BOLIVARIAN MACHINE: A VENEZUELA RECLAIMED…  217

ways. The British historian John Lynch, who presents Rousseau in a

mostly positive light in his 2006 biography, states that Bolívar shared the
Genevan thinker’s belief that only the law is sovereign but adds that
Bolívar was writing for a community with a “special racial formation” and
that he had deep social inequalities to overcome while Rousseau wrote
only for the petit bourgeoisie.27
Castro Leiva, in contrast, is among those who view Rousseau negatively
and who sees Bolívar’s interest in him also negatively. Rousseau, as we
have previously stated, became an object of critique in the decades after
World War II for his notion of the general will—as David Lay Williams
explains in a 2014 monograph that recuperates Rousseau’s figure just as
Judith N. Shklar’s Men and Citizens had done earlier though differently.28
Castro Leiva, then, does not try to adapt Rousseau. He is different in this
way from the historian Augusto Mijares who, as we saw in Chap. 1, recov-
ers Venezuela’s 1811 constitution without saying no to Bolívar, finessing
his Cartagena Manifesto. Perhaps, he is more like Blanco Fombona, who
rejects Rousseau as a model for a modern Venezuela but who continues to
use Bolívar as a symbol. Bolívar is the anti-Rousseau, the adult Rousseau.
But Castro Leiva is unlike Blanco Fombona as well in that he does not
wish to retain Bolívar as a model or allow Rousseau to stand without rigor-
ous critique. In his own particular project for contemporary Venezuelans,
he is concerned to shed light on Rousseau’s civic subject who subordinates
his individual needs to larger, social ones and to show how Bolívar like
Rousseau creates a hermeneutic based on wholeness at the expense of
individual rights. Rousseau’s general will has become Venezuela’s tyranny.
Against the tradition that became hegemonic in Venezuela, Castro
Leiva speaks of one that could have been. In his 1986 essay “La elocuencia
de la libertad” (“La eloquence of liberty”), he focuses on Bolívar’s 1812
Manifiesto de Cartagena, as all Venezuelan actors must, as we have said—
the text that is at the center of Venezuela’s intellectual tradition along with
the 1811 constitution it reframes. Like Mijares, Castro Leiva recuperates the
constitution and the First Republic, though he provocatively reproduces
in italics the dismissive language used by Bolívar, who called it the patria
boba (the foolish fatherland), as if requiring readers to work their way
through the linguistic and conceptual barriers created by the derogatory
term. What he does, though, is not to promote the 1811 constitution but
instead to reconstruct the liberal ideas of Miguel José Sanz and Juan
Germán Roscío, two of the republic’s leaders, the latter who coauthored
the 1811 constitution. Telling of these individuals’ political acts in the
218  R. T. CONN

early moments of the war, he demonstrates that their conceptions of polit-

ical community are forerunners of the positive and negative liberties of
which the Russian-British social and political theorist Isaiah Berlin speaks.29
For Castro Leiva, ideas are voices. He describes theirs as moderate, break-
ing them down into their empathetic and rational components.30 This is a
Venezuelan liberal tradition in genesis, one that is concerned with liberty,
patriotism, and individual rights but that has been pushed to the side by
the Enlightenment tradition he is critiquing, what he calls enlightened
political reason. Liberty means for Bolívar not the right to have one’s own
ideas, as Sanz and Roscio assert, but the historical obligation to belong to
the community for the good of the community, to submit to the general
will, which in Venezuela has meant total obedience.
In citing Isaiah Berlin, Castro Leiva is using one of the most well-­
known critics of Rousseau to create a new context for the examination
of Venezuela’s Bolivarian tradition. That context is the field of philoso-
phy as articulated within the contemporary international academy.
Through the field, he seeks to bring the discipline of intellectual history
to Venezuela, and by so doing to correct what he sees as the plague of
his country: historicism. By historicism, he means the concept that ideas
evolve over time. But it is not only the work of Berlin and his famous but
polemical notion that liberty is the absence of obstruction that concern
him. He incorporates notions of other figures such as British philoso-
pher J. L. Austin, British historian Quentin Skinner and US American
philosopher Richard Rorty, all who are critical of Rousseau and who in
this way form part of the tradition of which David Lay Williams speaks.
Castro Leiva uses them as a philosophical foundation to “unthink”
Bolívar’s characterization of Venezuela’s first constitutional moments
and to formulate a tradition based on the individual. With all this, in
what is an interesting departure from the likes of Carrera Damas, and, at
the same time, a new perhaps more sophisticated instance of the written
Bolívar in which textual analysis and the making of argument offer a new
form of liberation, Castro Leiva will also argue that the values of the cult
as understood by Carrera Damas should not be seen as constituting a
graft imposed on Bolívar by institutions and explicators, but as natural
extensions and outcomes of Bolívar’s own words. The Enlightenment
ended but it remains alive as long as there are public authorities who
reproduce Bolívar’s words and concepts that came from that period. We
have seen those authorities often in this book. In Uslar Pietri’s speech to
the Venezuelan congress in 1980, on the occasion of the 150th cente-
 8  REVISING THE BOLIVARIAN MACHINE: A VENEZUELA RECLAIMED…  219

nary of Bolívar’s death, we had them in full view, the photographs

included in the publication recording the act showing speaker and audi-
ence, with all the leaders of society dutifully submitting.
Crucial examples of Bolívar’s own words, own concepts, are the Gran
Colombia and the Bolivian Constitution. Castro Leiva does not speak of
the Gran Colombia or the Bolivian Constitution in the context of the uses
to which they were put in Venezuela afterwards, though he is engaging
with them precisely because they were. He refers neither to Liberals’
deployment of the Gran Colombia in the nineteenth century nor to Gil
Fortoul’s and Vallenilla Lanz’s use of both in their cultural work. He does
not focus on how Gil Fortoul incorporates the defunct state in the conser-
vative national history he produces in 1907 and how he raises up the
Bolivian Constitution as a model for Latin American constitutionalism.
Nor does he speak of what Vallenilla Lanz does with both in his 1919
Cesarismo democrático, or of what Gil Fortoul later does with the two in
his 1930 rewrite of Historia constitucional de Venezuela. Not concerned
with how his predecessors positioned them according to the criteria of
positivist understandings of race and nation state, he offers a critique of
the Gran Colombia and the Bolivian Constitution in the light of three fac-
tors in the historical moment: Bolívar’s ideas, particularly ones he had
arrived at, he asserts, well before 1819; the militarization that he sees as
having been the condition for the Gran Colombia’s existence; and the
crisis in the structure of the Gran Colombia—what he sees as the reason
for which Bolívar conceived of the Bolivian Constitution.
Castro Leiva’s quarrel is not with the constitutional basis of the Gran
Colombia, which was established by the 1821 Cúcuta Congress and which
had a substantial history of five years by the time of the crisis in 1826. His
concern has to do with the crisis itself, which for contemporary publics has
been lost from view. In the context of that crisis, some among the
Venezuelan elites wanted monarchy for the Gran Colombia to guarantee
their rights vis-à-vis Bogotá. Pétion’s model of the state at the same time
was important for Bolívar, Castro Leiva affirms. What was Bolívar’s
response to the crisis? To fuse opposites, thereby satisfying the elites in
Venezuela, but also his own desire to make his Enlightenment ideas pre-
vail. For this reason, Castro Leiva concludes that the Bolivian Constitution
has no positivity unto itself as a foundational document, existing only as
the improvised imagining of one individual who, inspired by Rousseau’s
vision of an organic society in which the people are sovereign through the
law, is determined to maintain an equilibrium between opposing forces,
220  R. T. CONN

namely what he calls the democratic project of Haitian president Alexandre

Pétion and the project of monarchy as represented by José Antonio Páez.31
Harmonizing opposites has no intellectual basis.
But, as Castro Leiva shows, the constitution was also nothing like what
we might think it was when examined from the perspective of Montesquieu.
The division of the branches whose purpose is to prevent the tyranny of
one branch over the other is eclipsed by the addition of the office of cen-
sors, which is to represent the people without the participation of the
people. The Bolivian Constitution, Leiva Castro reasons, requires the
obedience of the citizens. Government rules the people, not the other
way round.32
In addition to the Gran Colombia and the Bolivian Constitution—the
one the Latin American state of 1819–1830, the other the document pro-
duced for Bolivia and introduced into Venezuelan politics in the first
decades of the twentieth century—he dismantles other Bolívar constructs
and texts to reveal the Enlightenment tradition that is behind them. Most
important are the statements Bolívar made against political parties begin-
ning in the 1812 Cartagena Manifesto. It is not just that Venezuelans
must be cognizant of those statements but that they must understand the
source from which they came. Bolívar’s view on political parties is manifest
in all the moments in Bolívar’s career, but what must be understood is that
view reflected the way in which political parties were conceived. Bolívar is
himself a part of the problem of political factionalism that he denounces.
Castro Leiva, as we will see shortly, targets in particular the 1830 con-
gress as he seeks to build up a conceptual framework that directly takes on
what Mijares finesses in 1976. He does not make Bolívar whole by stating
he acknowledged the importance of political parties at the end of his life.
Nor does he limit himself, as we are seeing, to Bolívar. Instead, in a coun-
try in which parties have had an uncertain existence and in which Bolívar’s
own words about virtue and citizenship were repeatedly deployed, Castro
Leiva seeks to build new knowledge that moves the debate away from
Bolívar to the history of ideas and the new critical models available in the
international academy. Vallenilla Lanz, we will remember, tore apart the
political parties of the nineteenth century, alleging that they were without
a foundation, having ideologies imported from Europe that did not meet
the needs of the people. In a sense, Castro Leiva departs critically from the
same place as Vallenilla Lanz in his initial perception, in that he, too, is
discontented with the legacy of the idea of the party in Venezuela. The
difference in what they come up with, though, is immense. Vallenilla Lanz,
 8  REVISING THE BOLIVARIAN MACHINE: A VENEZUELA RECLAIMED…  221

who characterizes Bolívar as representing the republican order that Páez

and independence surpass, still presents Bolívar as virtuous, deploying the
category of civic virtue handed down by him. Going against this, Castro
Leiva seeks to build a modern concept for political parties so that they can
flourish under conditions that do not involve violence or authoritarianism.
As we have spoken of with regard to his reflection on Sanz and Roscío, the
solution is in how people speak. They should not do so in the name of
irrefutable first principles of which harmony and civic virtue are some.
Rather, they should engage by understanding themselves as voices and
they should do so with clarity about how to use their voices without
appealing to first principles.
Political parties were firmly in the hands of the oligarchy from 1830 to
1858. They became ghosts of the past in the federal period from 1863 to
1903, conjured as rallying cries by local caudillos, including by Cipriano
Castro who in 1899 declared himself a Liberal before marching on
Caracas. They lay inexistent in the Gómez period through 1935, with Gil
Fortoul and Vallenilla Lanz striking them out as possibilities for
Venezuelan civil society and with critics in 1928, a generational moment,
jailed and exiled in their attempt at challenging Gómez. López Contreras
promoted them while outlawing the communist party. They were briefly
visible in the interregnum that was Betancourt’s Acción Democrática
Party (1945–1948); and were finally restored, if you like, with the
Puntofijo Pact of 1958, following the removal of Pérez Jiménez by the
military and Betancourt’s return from exile. In 1998, with the election of
Hugo Chávez, the traditional parties that dominated from 1958 on,
Acción Democrática (AD) and the Comité de Organización Política
Electoral Independiente (COPEI), lost their base. The Chavista Party
became a controlling force in the first decade of the twentieth century.
New parties emerged to compete with Chávez’s Socialist Party.
Castro Leiva hardly views the Punto Fijo Act of 1958 as a moment to
celebrate. Instead, he takes aim at a political culture that performs obedi-
ence, the two major parties sharing power in accordance with the act and
happy to rehearse the ideals of civic virtue. He challenges a purportedly
modern state that uses Bolívar’s words and ideas as if they were applicable
in the present. He also goes back to the beginning of the Venezuelan state,
that is, to 1830. As for the 1830 legislature, he critiques it for subordinat-
ing the ideas of the political blocs to its own will. So that the violence of
the war is quelled and contained, all must obey. The congress is now
sovereign.33
222  R. T. CONN

Leiva Castro is bringing together multiple contexts as he attacks in

particular the category of Rousseauian harmony. It is interesting, indeed,
that he judges the Bolivian Constitution in the light of the category of
harmony, not in the light of the concept of the lifetime president; this of
no relevance in the long decades of the 1960s to the 1990s in which lives
were lived richly within a developed nation framework and when the
model of government was democratic republicanism, with the military
always in the background, an immovable institution. The question he asks
is, can a political form, whether the Bolivian Constitution, the 1830 legis-
lature, or the Punto Fijo accord of the 1960s–1990s, have as its justifica-
tion the concept of harmony alone?34
The category of the cult of Bolívar is important for Castro Leiva as he
sees his own praxis as a response to it. For him, the intellectual world that
has come out of the critique of the Venezuelan cult that Carrera Damas
elevated as a topic for exploration is severely limited. Those who rail
against the cult (the word used by Carrera Damas to designate the
Bolivarian tradition) are, he says, as much a part of the problem as are
those who promote it. Their responses of irreverence are no more than
simple refutations of individual texts or new readings of the same institu-
tionalized understanding of his figure. Focusing only on Bolívar’s texts or
the established critical traditions that have grown up around them is not
sufficient:

In other words, if [we assume] the “texts” of Bolívar are Bolívar’s ideas
instead of a hypostasis. On both sides of the dispute, on that of the Cult of
Bolívar and that of “Bolivarian criticism,” it seems there is a hermeneutical
strategy that is shared: one according to which texts are made to speak for
themselves from the literalness of their meanings and are seen, then, in this
way as affecting the surrounding reality. The error or heresy of the author of
the Cult of Bolívar [Carrera Damas] consisted in his candid irreverence, in
having read something different or in a manner different from a single
Bolívar.35

Through his reflection on the Enlightenment, he is proposing a way

to speak about the cult in Venezuela that will allow for new instruments
to be developed. Indeed, he seeks to make the Enlightenment alive
again, though not as a tradition to bring into the present but as one to
understand critically precisely so that those in the present can under-
stand its premises that are still in effect and liberate themselves from
them. First principles must be understood so that they can be jettisoned.
 8  REVISING THE BOLIVARIAN MACHINE: A VENEZUELA RECLAIMED…  223

To do this, Castro Leiva, is using, as he explains, a category from phi-

losophy known as the hypostasis or underlying reality. Understand that
reality. Explore how ideas have been taken from specific places and reas-
sembled, and one will begin to clear the public sphere once and for all
of the “myopia” that has allowed the so-called cult to prosper. The
effects of that “myopia” can be seen in the “uses and abuses” of which
Picón Salas speaks, whether on the Right, the Center, or the Left, be the
actor Larrazábal, Vallenilla Lanz, Blanco Fombona, Picón Salas himself,
or Augusto Mijares.
Is there anything to recover from the work of previous intellectuals?
What of cosmopolitan and democratic reconstructions of Bolívar’s figure?
Castro Leiva is uninterested in the cultural politics in which they have
engaged: Blanco Fombona (Venezuela and Latin America as part of a
greater Hispanic world including Spain); Picón Salas (Venezuela and Latin
America as part of modern Western culture); and Mijares (Bolívar as a
figure who stood for modern social and political values, and in particular,
who recognized the separation of powers and deferred to political parties).
Castro Leiva is concerned with a new kind of doing. This doing is the
practice of performing philosophy, of reading texts that form part of the
Venezuelan canon in a new way, of saying yes to those texts, but also say-
ing no to them by sending discussion into unfamiliar territory where the
terms of the debate are defined by the rigor of argument, not by the logic
of affirmation and denunciation. He seeks to provide his readers with the
Bolívar of the times, the figure, who, he maintains, stood for liberalism,
but also stood against it. Thus, we are to see Bolívar’s texts as strategic
responses elaborated in the context of European debates that obtained in
the moment, debates concerning, for instance, the relationship between
the individual and the collective as well the idea of utopia. That is the place
in which to understand them, nowhere else.
With this, the connections to the larger tradition established and expli-
cated, the particular decisions made by Bolívar can purportedly be seen
with clarity, as can his intellectual legacy, which, Castro Leiva tells us, is a
resoundingly negative one. Bolívar’s own political and philosophical for-
mulations, together with his perpetually absent persona, did more harm
than good.
We refer at the beginning of Chap. 3 and also immediately above to the
written Bolívar, the figure constituted by his texts that provides a platform
for political intervention. Here, we have explored how Castro Leiva uses
that figure to critique the Enlightenment’s different critical strands while
224  R. T. CONN

showing how elements of those strands have come to settle in Venezuela,

detached from the traditions in which they originated. Castro Leiva, in
performing this genealogical work, is after something large, the creation
of a Venezuelan philosophical tradition of a kind that can be the basis for
a strong polis; one that is truly autonomous, in which ideas are evaluated
against the criterion of rational and sentimental persuasion rather than the
collective idea of tradition based in virtue with a capital “v”; and one in
which Bolívar’s documents will no longer be freestanding but part of a
larger apparatus making possible a new, more engaged form of discussion
that cuts ideas down to size, making them digestible by the many, not a
matter of life or death.
Castro Leiva was a long way from the Bolivarian Society but he was
trying to re-educate elites that had grown accustomed to the society’s les-
sons, speaking also directly to the same senate that Uslar Pietri addressed
in 1980. He was an intellectual who built a philosophic practice for his
country, one for unthinking concepts that found their way into political
discourse; a public philosopher teaching others how to think through
materials familiar to them in an entirely new way that had nothing to do
with the public pomp and ceremony of which Bolívar’s virtuous figure was
the foundation, but rather through the labor of reasoning, one which he
invited his readers and audiences to perform alongside him.

Notes
1. See Mariano Picón Salas: Viejos y nuevos mundos, Ed. Guillermo Sucre
(Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1983), 97. (From Pequeño tratado de la
tradición: “Tradición como nostalgia y como valor histórico” (Caracas:
Instituto de Filosofía, Facultad de Humanidades y Educación, Universidad
Central de Venezuela, 1940s).
2. Idem. Picón Salas writes. “In general it can be said (even though it may
hurt our native vanity) that Bolívar is still without an interpretive History
of the kind that lives up to his name in the way those of Caesar or perhaps
of Napoléon do.” “En general puede decirse que (aunque eso lastime
nuestra vanidad vernácula) Bolívar aún carece de una Historia interpreta-
tiva a la altura de su nombre, como lo tiene César o quizá Napoleón.”
3. Idem., “Ya en el juvenil “Manifiesto de Cartagena” sacaba la revolución
venezolana de su primitivo “impasse” ideológico, del culto de las ideas
abstractas, para definir el fenómeno peculiar.”
4. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la
Mancha (Madrid: Taurus: 1960).
 8  REVISING THE BOLIVARIAN MACHINE: A VENEZUELA RECLAIMED…  225

5. See Mariano Picón Salas: Viejos y nuevos mundos, Ed. Guillermo Sucre
(Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1983), 387–389.
6. Ibid., 74.
7. Mariano Picón Salas, “Problemática de la historia común,” in Viejos y nue-
vos mundos, Ed. Guillermo Sucre (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1983),
272. From Unidad y nacionalismo en la historia hispanoamericana (Unity
and Nationalism in Spanish American History).
8. Ibid. “Proceso del pensamiento venezolano,” 62. From Comprensión de
Venezuela/Comprehension of Venezuela, 1949.
9. Ibid., “Notas sobre el problema de nuestra cultura,” 75.
10. Ibid., “Proceso del pensamiento venezolano,” 63. “Venezuela era también
el desierto y los hombres del desierto, ansiosos de expresión, cuyo caudillo
y profeta se llamó Ezequel Zamora. Pero ocurrió que esa educación un
poco para las “élites” intelectuales (la educación del Latín y del Derecho
Romano de nuestros primeros hombre públicos) no fue reemplazada por
una Educación democrática, por el “humanismo moderno” con que
soñaba Cecilio Acosta.
11. Ibid., “Antitesis y tesis de nuestra historia,” 54–55.
12. Ibid., 62–63.
13. Carracciolo Parra Pérez, 1992, Historia de la primera república de
Venezuela (Caracas: Fundación Ayacucho Biblioteca), 294.
14. Ibid., “Americas desavenidas,” 281.
15. Ibid., 281.
16. Ibid., 284.
17. Ibid., 68.
18. Viejos y nuevos mundos, 1983, ed. Guillermo Sucre (Caracas: Biblioteca
Ayacucho), 119. (“Entre prosistas venezolanos,” 1963).
19. Mariano Picón Salas, Mariano Picón Salas: Viejos y nuevos mundos. From
Regreso de tres mundos: un hombre en su generación (México: Fondo de
Cultura Económica, 1959).
20. Germán Carrera Damas, 2003, El culto a Bolívar (Caracas: Alfadil
Ediciones), 308–310.
21. Ibid., 41. English translation mine. “La invocacón del romanticismo liter-
ario, transpuesto a la historiografía por escritores que eran esto más que
historiadores, ha servido tradicionalmente para explicar este proceso, al
menos en sus comienzos. A la exaltación romántica de Felipe Larrazábal y
Juan Vicente González, de manera principal, se atribuye la creación del
culto bolivariano.”
22. Ibid., 47, 283.
23. Ibid., 47–54: 294–295; 308–309.
226  R. T. CONN

24. Ibid., 286. “Todos los gobiernos, todos los gobernantes, han usado y
abusado de este sentimiento popular, apoyando en él su política o derivando
de él algo de prestigio para sus posturas desasistidas de brillo propio.”
25. Ibid., 276.
26. Ibid., 77–78.
27. John Lynch, Simón Bolívar: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2006), 284–286.
28. David Lay Williams, Rousseau’s Social Contract: An Introduction (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
29. Luis Castro Leiva, “La elocuencia de la libertad,” in Obras, Vol. I, Para
Pensar Bolívar, Ed., Carole Leal Curiel (Caracas: Fundación Polar, 2005),
185–186.
30. Ibid., 206.
31. Ibid., 51–53.
32. Luis Castro Leiva, “Historicismo bolivariano,” 92.
33. Ibid., 138.
34. Ibid., 96.
35. Luis Castro Leiva, Obras, Vol. I, Para Pensar Bolívar, Ed., Carole Leal Curiel
(Caracas: Fundación Polar, 2005), 292. “Es decir, si los “textos” de Bolívar
eran las ideas de Bolívar y no una hipóstasis. En ambos lados de la disputa,
tanto en el del Culto a Bolívar como en el de la “crítica bolivariana”, parece
que hubo coincidencia por mantener una estrategia hermeneútica común: la
de que los textos hablan por sí solos desde la literalidad de sus sentidos y
desde allí afectan la realidad circundante. Lo que significa que el error o la
herejía del autor del Culto a Bolívar consistía en franca irreverencia, o en
haber leído otras cosas o de otro modo a un único Bolívar.”
 CHAPTER 9

Pan Americanism Above Ground:

Bolívar in the United States

On the first floor of the Organization of American States (OAS) Building

in Washington, D.C., just beyond the interior courtyard famous for the
hybrid rubber and fig tree planted by William Howard Taft in 1910, sym-
bolizing the intertwining of “south and north,” the Peace Tree, as it is
known, and through the newly named Marcus Garvey Hall of Culture, sits
the Simón Bolívar Room. This large room where the 34-member states
conduct the business of the organization is bracketed by two miniature
equestrian statues of Bolívar, the one at its main entrance from Garvey
Hall, the other opposite, at its patio entrance from the OAS gardens.
Inside, a portrait of Bolívar, the only object on the wall facing the raised
table of the OAS chair and OAS president, watches over delegates at their
respective seats, half of them with the portrait to their left, the other half
with the portrait to their right.
That Bolívar is the institutional face of the OAS, his birthday celebrated
each year, could very well accord with expectations. For if the mission of
the hemispheric organization is to represent the totality of the Americas,
what better figure, one might think, to carry out that symbolic role than
Bolívar who, as the OAS states on its website, in 1826 sought to organize
the first “American” league of republics. The appointment of Bolívar to
that role, however, was not coincident with the beginnings of the OAS,
established under a charter of the United Nations in 1948, with its head-
quarters at the old Pan American Union Building. In fact, it was not until
1983, 35 years after the founding of the organization and the year of the

© The Author(s) 2020 227

R. T. Conn, Bolívar’s Afterlife in the Americas,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26218-1_9
228  R. T. CONN

bi-centenary celebration of his birth, not of his death, the customary

moment in Latin America for such celebrations, that the figure of Bolívar
was embraced. Member states, at the urging of the Bolivarian nations,
among them Panama, voted to name the first-floor space where they had
been meeting since 1960, the famous mahogany Governors Room of the
second floor not big enough for their expanded ranks, the Libertador
Simón Bolívar Room.1
Two reasons explain the Latin American states’ desire to take advantage
of the bi-centenary to place the OAS under the aegis of the Venezuelan
liberator. On the one hand, there was a political need. The United States
had broken ranks once again by pursuing its own policies, in this case,
covert military operations in Central America, prompting them to look for
a way to reaffirm the principle of non-intervention on which the OAS was
founded. On the other hand, there was the matter of how the OAS could
reaffirm that principle, particularly how it could do so from within the
context of its peculiar political position as a regional organization located
in the capital of the country of its most powerful member, a position dra-
matized by the fact of its building site being adjacent to the Department
of the Interior, Daughters of the American Revolution, and Red Cross
buildings, right on the southwestern edge of the Ellipse, the large green
extending from the grounds of the White House and the Eisenhower
Executive Office Building to the Washington Mall. The strategy chosen
was to turn to Bolívar, a figure belonging to Latin America, of course, but
one who also had a deep history in the United States, the equestrian statue
of him that sits majestically on Virginia Avenue at the intersection of the
OAS Building, the OAS Annex, and the Department of the Interior, gifted
by the Venezuelan government in 1959 with Arturo Uslar Pietri repre-
senting Venezuela’s Bolivarian Society for the dedication, a vestige from a
time when the US American public knew his name. That name was now
being made to be synonymous with the defense of the sovereignty of the
individual states of the Americas with no mention of the Gran Colombia
or the Federation of the Andes.2
In this chapter, we look at the story of that time, focusing on the phe-
nomenon of interest in Bolívar that began in the late teens and continued
through the decade and a half after World War II, propelled in part by
Venezuela, which from early in the twentieth century partnered with the
United States to promote its bronze ambassador-at-large. This was the
Pan American period, (1889–1959), which provided the foundation for
the political, institutional, and cultural reality of the United States during
 9  PAN AMERICANISM ABOVE GROUND: BOLÍVAR IN THE UNITED STATES  229

the inter-war decades of the 1920s and 1930s, but which until the past
two decades has largely been forgotten in US American history and the
history of the Americas, in its interwar iteration covered over by the period
category of US isolationism from Europe for which it furnished a content.
As Lars Schoultz writes in Beneath the United States: A History of
U.S. Policy Toward Latin America, the term Pan American refers, on the
one hand, to US abiding interests in influencing or dominating the nations
to its south for security and economic reasons, and on the other hand, to
the institutionalized form that those interests took starting with the First
International Conference of American States of 1889 and 1890, convened
by two-time secretary of state, James G. Blaine, and continuing through
the 1950s.3 If a word or a term can define an historical period, the adjec-
tive Pan American, coined by Blaine in 1871 on the model of the Pan-
Slavic movements, as the progressive Joseph Byrne Lockey, author of Pan
Americanism: Its Beginnings, tells us, did just that. Lockey offers a linguis-
tic and conceptual basis for the vast hemispheric web of groups and initia-
tives that came into existence under its banner. As an example of the
degree to which the term penetrated society, by 1920, it was so common
in discourse that Lockey could detail in the book he brought out that
same year the many English-, Spanish-, Portuguese-, and French-language
dictionaries with entries for it.4
Not all the US-oriented hemispheric projects from the period attached
the label “Pan America” to their initiatives. All, though, were cut from the
same ideological cloth, promoting views of hemispheric integration. To
use Frederick Pike’s distinction, some of these projects took a “hard”
approach, seeking capitalistic and/or industrial opportunities that were
many times tinged by an open racism; others took a soft approach, mean-
ing one that was spiritual, with Latin America appearing as a source of
inspiration to cure and overcome the ills of modernity; and still, some
were the product of both visions.5
There was the Pan American Railways Company of 1892, which prom-
ised to connect Texas to Patagonia by rail but which failed after a year; the
Chicago Pan American Exposition of 1893, which showcased “examples”
of typical Latin Americans in enclosed model villages; and the 1901 Pan
­American Exposition in Buffalo at which the president of the United
States, William McKinley, was gunned down by an assassin. There was also
the Pan American Union of 1910–1948, the most successful regional
organization in the world up to and during its time and one of the centers
of focus of this chapter.
230  R. T. CONN

With the coming into being of the Pan American Union, the entire
movement coalesced into a network of civic, academic, professional,
commercial, and governmental initiatives, all hemispheric in scope, all
sponsored or encouraged by the United States. The majority were
stamped with the name “Pan American.” Extending from north to
south, in areas such as business, infrastructure, health, academia, art and
culture, and international law, the network resulted in the creation of
multiple treaties, agreements, and codes that made possible the exchange
of goods and the regulated movement of “citizens” across borders.
Institutional Pan ­Americanism, as Lars Schoultz calls the new and most
definitive iteration of the movement, represented nothing less than a sea
change in US attitudes toward Latin America. The change, though, had
its roots in the 1890s, when, as Marc Berger writes, the new hemispheric
view began to take hold. He writes of a “south” that, while presently
unlike the United States, had the potential to resemble the emerging
northern power through industrial and cultural incorporation, this after
decades during which Latin America had been regarded by the United
States as essentially uncivilized and barbaric, home to a culture without
a work ethic.6
If no movement is destined to come into being, the beginnings of Pan
Americanism were particularly uncertain and complex, something the
­
Cuban José Martí, one of Pan Americanism’s most insightful commenta-
tors and critics, made a point of explaining to his Latin American reader-
ship, warning of a fickle US Congress whose political parties held opposing
views on the importance of Latin America for the United States and that,
therefore, with a simple change of leadership was capable of dropping
Latin America in a flash.7
Blaine, the founder of the movement, planned for the First International
Conference of American States to take place in the early 1880s, after the
War of the Pacific had come to a conclusion in order to discuss ways for
the American republics to avoid both civil and regional wars and to begin
to create a hemispheric infrastructure to promote commercial ties. But as
advanced as his plans were, they were derailed when Republican president
James A. Garfield was shot and killed in the Washington, D.C., train sta-
tion in the company of his two sons and Blaine himself. Vice-President
Chester A.  Arthur, a Democrat, assumed the office of the presidency,
immediately dismissing all of the members of Garfield’s cabinet, including
the secretary of state, and canceling Blaine’s much-anticipated hemispheric
meeting. The conference finally convened several years later, but no one
 9  PAN AMERICANISM ABOVE GROUND: BOLÍVAR IN THE UNITED STATES  231

could have imagined it would. As Blaine was the force behind it, nothing
could happen without his finding his way back into the White House, a
possibility that would become reality in one of two ways. Either Blaine
himself would have to win the office of the presidency, which he in fact
sought when he ran against the Democrat Grover Cleveland in 1884, or
another representative of the pro-business and pro-abolition party, the so-­
called Party of Lincoln and the north, would have to reappoint him secre-
tary of state. The second scenario is the one that materialized. After
Republican Benjamin Harrison defeated Grover Cleveland in 1888, Blaine
was swiftly restored to his post.8
The 1889 conference was a six month-long diplomatic event, with 17
states sending delegates, all invited to tour the East Coast and Midwest by
train before sitting down at the nation’s capital to discuss a range of issues
including the building of a railroad connecting the hemisphere, patent and
copyright law, as well as territorial integrity and non-aggression. The
meetings were not for naught. At the conference, the Latin American rep-
resentatives and their US counterparts agreed on creating the International
Union of American Republics, to be served by a secretariat located in
Washington, D.C., called the Commercial Bureau of American Republics,
with the amount of funding from each member state dependent on its
population size. The story of the union and the secretariat that served it is
difficult to follow, as both entities underwent several changes in name and
structure, the result of resolutions taken by subsequent International
Conferences of American States, the most important of the conferences in
this regard being the Fourth International Conference of American States
in Buenos Aires in 1910. There, in the capital of the nation that had high
hopes of competing with the United States both commercially and diplo-
matically, it was resolved that the International Union of American
Republics would henceforth be known as the Union of American
Republics. It was also agreed, in what was the more significant decision for
our discussion, that the Commercial Bureau of American Republics or
International Bureau of American Republics, as it had been called since
1902 as a result of lobbying by the Guatemalan delegation at the Second
International Conference of American States in Mexico City, would be
called the Pan American Union.
The change in the name of the secretariat could not have been more
significant. Not only did the new name incorporate the term coined by
Blaine in 1871, the same one that had become associated with US hemi-
spheric industrial and manufacturing interests, but it also adopted the
232  R. T. CONN

word “union” that the international organization itself used, signally the
primary role the newly defined secretariat conceived for itself while invit-
ing confusion with regard to whether the new secretariat served the
Union of American States, or led it. The timing was also significant
because a building designed by Paul Cret and Albert Kelsey for the pur-
pose of housing the secretariat, with funding from Andrew Carnegie, had
just been completed on Washington, D.C.’s Ellipse. The brainchild of
John Barrett, director general of the Pan American Union from 1910 to
1920, the Pan American Union Building was an architectural phenome-
non. Its façade decorated with two friezes, one emblematic of the north,
the other of the south, constituted a bold image of the hemispheric dia-
logue the United States desired to preside over. Prosperity, development,
and fraternity, all in the context of open, public exchange: these were the
Enlightenment-inspired concepts that defined the mission of the secre-
tariat as formulated by John Barrett and his successor Leo Rowe, both
determined to integrate the Americas according to US terms in the era of
dollar diplomacy and the Roosevelt corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.
The term dollar diplomacy almost says it all, describing the approach
taken by the United States to encourage investment in Latin America,
including the purchase of the region’s debt, specifically in the Caribbean
and Central America, in order to expand the US economy, reduce the
financial influence of European powers in the hemisphere, and limit, then,
the latter’s claims on debtor countries. It was the handmaiden to the
Roosevelt Corollary, declared in 1904  in response to a decision by the
World Court to recognize the legality of the United Kingdom’s,
Germany’s, and Italy’s blockade of Venezuelan ports which the three pow-
ers had mounted the previous year to force a Venezuela government bank-
rupted to make good on repayment of monies lent by citizens of their
countries. The financial situation of the country was the result of the quix-
otic foray of its executive, President Cipriano Castro, into the Colombian
War of a Thousand Days (1899–1902) and the civil war of 1901–1903,
one of the two bloodiest of Venezuela’s civil wars that Castro provoked
when he took Caracas in 1899, challenging the federalist system. Theodore
Roosevelt, who could not accept the World Court’s decision for the rea-
son that it challenged US claims on Latin America, responded in the lan-
guage of the dispute. Cunningly presenting the United States as a defender
of the principle of a nation’s right to be repaid, he declared that the United
States had the responsibility and prerogative to intervene in Latin American
 9  PAN AMERICANISM ABOVE GROUND: BOLÍVAR IN THE UNITED STATES  233

republics on behalf of European states in any real or potential situation in

which there were conditions that could lead to a blockade of the port of
a debtor nation. But he also went beyond the terms of the debate,
expanding the United States’ right to intervene under more general con-
ditions. Taking advantage of the binary from the time that was central to
discussion of nation construction, civilization and barbarism, Roosevelt
distinguished between civilized and uncivilized or barbaric countries, the
former defined as having the ability to govern themselves, the latter as
not having that ability, requiring, therefore, US intervention. The
Roosevelt Corollary was more than just an extension of the Monroe
Doctrine, however. It was the doctrine.
The Monroe Doctrine had never been defended on the world stage
other than in 1823 when it was proclaimed. It was not that Europe had
not made claims on Latin America in the nineteenth century. In 1861,
not only did France, Spain, and the United Kingdom blockade Veracruz,
Mexico, to force repayment of loans temporarily halted by Liberal presi-
dent Benito Juárez, Napoleon III in 1862 launched a four-­year occupa-
tion of Mexico, during which time the United States was embroiled in its
Civil War (1861–1865) and therefore in no position to confront the
French Colonial Empire-building foray other than to send armaments
to the Liberal government of Juárez ousted by the French-backed
Conservative Party. But if the United States did not invoke the Monroe
Doctrine to denounce the occupation, this did not mean that the doc-
trine did not find its way into US public discourse. An anti-war northern-
state political group that advocated for peace between the Union and the
Confederacy saw fit to resurrect it in order to undercut the North. The
copperheads, as the group was called, accused the federal government of
pursuing war with the South at the expense of what was truly of conse-
quence: driving France out of Mexico to uphold the doctrine.9
The Monroe Doctrine, elevated with the 1903 corollary to an axiom
from which related “truths” could be derived, was pronounced on
December 2, 1823, by James Monroe, the fifth president of the United
States. At the helm of a country that had held its own in the War of 1812
and that since had increased its naval power, Monroe communicated the
new policy in his State of the Union Address. He declared that no
European state could acquire additional territories in the Americas with-
out such acts being taken as a declaration of war against the United States.
Monroe was sending a clear message to Fernando VII and to France, the
234  R. T. CONN

latter which had recently returned the absolutist monarch to power, hav-
ing sent 60,000 troops into Spain beginning on April 7, 1823, and seized
Cádiz, where the Cortes had taken refuge, on September 30, 1823, and
which would keep an occupying force numbering 40,000 in Spain until
1828. Fernando VII had launched his reconquest in late 1814, after the
British restored him to power, so the possibility of a new military cam-
paign led by France to defend the universal principle of conservative,
monarchical rule in the name of the Holy Alliance was real, as Bolívar
himself felt in 1823 and 1824 with his diplomatic overtures to France
contemplating French recognition of the Gran Colombia in exchange for
acceptance of a Bourbon prince. With the doctrine, Monroe was also
addressing Russia, which was eyeing Alaska. More than Monroe, though,
the individual who undercut the absolutist monarchical dreams of the
Concert of Powers, established with the 1815 Treaty of Vienna (the
United Kingdom, Russia, Prussia, and Austria) and of which France
became a member in 1818 after reestablishing the Bourbon line, was
British foreign minister George Canning, whose country had refused to be
part of the Holy Alliance. Canning warned France against sending its naval
vessels across the seas, concerned to protect British trade with the American
republics.10
Eighty years after its proclamation—subsequent to the US seizure of
the Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico from Spain, its shepherding of
Panamanian independence in preparation for the building of a canal con-
necting the Atlantic and the Pacific, and its mediation of a peace agree-
ment between Colombia’s Liberal and Conservative Parties, whose
three-year-long brutal civil war had resulted in 100,000 deaths and the
loss of its northern province of Panama to a US-supported Independentist
Party—the Monroe Doctrine had gone from being unactionable to being
foundational in the minds of the US American public. As the history books
tell us, Teddy Roosevelt had converted the United States into “police-
man” and “finance regulator” in the Caribbean and Central America.
Barrett, the first of the two director generals of the Pan American
Union, had been a publicist for businesses and corporations from the US
Northwest seeking markets for their products in Asia. He was also a US
ambassador to Colombia and Argentina, before he was made director of
the International Bureau. Transitioning the bureau to the Pan American
Union, he expanded the services already offered, including the bureau’s
bulletin, which now would be called the Bulletin of the Pan American
Union. He also instituted new services, most curiously, one that provided
 9  PAN AMERICANISM ABOVE GROUND: BOLÍVAR IN THE UNITED STATES  235

for the transmission of practical or pragmatic knowledge, as he defined it,

from the United States to the nations of Latin America, with the citizens
of each nation potentially playing the role of both contributor and receiver.
Those who wrote to the Pan American Union, availing themselves of the
international postal system, could either do so with the purpose of adding
to the archive in formation by, for instance, explaining how they had
started a business or school, or they could do so with the objective of
requesting information to guide them in their own particular projects after
which they could report back on the results. The idea was to create a vast,
self-perfecting repository of up-to-date techniques and solutions in the
arenas of education, health, industry, and so on, modeled on the spirit of
pragmatism and “good-old American know-how.” As for the Carnegie-­
funded building that housed the archive, it was every bit as much a part of
the project as was the bulletin or the archive, a veritable architectural mas-
terpiece intended, as Robert Alexander González has written, to accultur-
ate the political and commercial elites from across the Americas to the idea
that they all belonged to one and the same hemisphere and that they had
one and the same purpose.11
Indeed, Barrett, ever the publicist, wasted no time in seeking to posi-
tion the building squarely in the consciousness of US powerbrokers and
agents of business, authoring in 1911, the year it opened, a book detailing
the story of its genesis and construction, while in short pieces telling of his
correspondence with individuals from around the world who had written
to compliment him on the copy of Pan American Union bulletin quarterly
they had received from him and to request additional information; in these
releases he also spoke of the many US senators and representatives who
were already making use of the Pan American Union’s library eventually
named for Columbus (Columbus Memorial Library).
Appointed by Democrat Woodrow Wilson, Leo Rowe, the second of the
two director generals, and the one who would be the most famous, took the
reins of the Pan American Union subsequent to the World War. Rowe came
well prepared to carry out the work of the hemispheric institution, a professor
of political science at the University of Pennsylvania and a veteran of govern-
ment service, who was recruited early in his career by President McKinley to
form part of a commission tasked with writing a civil code for Puerto Rico, a
commission that met in 1902. The context, of course, was the new colonial
order that the United States created subsequent to defeating the Spanish
fleet in August of 1898, just three months after entering the ­Cuban War
of Independence, a war that had been going on for three years, since 1895,
236  R. T. CONN

with antecedents dating back decades. In 1899, along with other political
scientists, Rowe had already written about the necessity of providing tute-
lage to the peoples who had become “subjects” of the United States, and in
particular, about the necessity of thinking of those “subjects” differently,
not as members of a republic but as individuals to be overseen, with order
taking precedence over liberty. He went on after the 1902 committee work
to coauthor the civil code for Puerto Rico in 1908 and to be assistant secre-
tary of the treasury from 1917 to 1919, during the World War. Subsequent
to his appointment as the director general of the Pan American Union in
1920, the seasoned government intellectual adapted himself quickly to his
new role in accordance with the ideology of service through which Barrett
had defined it, presenting the Pan American Union as leading the way in
creating a new model for relations among governments, one defined by
transparency and openness rather than by secrecy and intrigue, an aspiration
that was typical of the anti-war sensibilities of the late teens and twenties. As
for the archive of which we have spoken and on which, no doubt, he based
at least in part his ideal of transparency—Rowe characterized it just as
Barrett had—as offering its users a reservoir of pragmatic information that
would enable them to contribute to the project of modernization in their
home countries.
The United States had upped the ante, a conclusion any observer from
the time who compared the Pan American Union to its predecessor could
have reached. Already some in Latin America viewed the Commercial
Bureau of American Republics or the International Bureau of American
Republics as promoting the business interests of the United States instead
of those of all member nations, and in fact, Chile, upon joining the
International Union of American Republics in 1890, as Joseph Smith
points out, made a public declaration accusing the Bureau of such bias.12
Here was a new institution whose purview had vastly expanded. It was
no longer simply a bureau but an entire administration. The United
States, which conceived, funded, and was home to the expanded institu-
tion, would henceforward be open to critiques of a more sweeping nature.
Really, how could it not have been? The fact that the term Pan American
was used; that the building was based in Washington, D.C.; that on the
back cover of its bulletin it defined itself as a hemispheric organization
and only presented itself as the organ of the Union of American Republics
at its convenience as for instance in the mid-1920s when seeking to defend
its international status in the US courts to avoid having to pay fines levied
 9  PAN AMERICANISM ABOVE GROUND: BOLÍVAR IN THE UNITED STATES  237

against a union administrator;13 that the US secretary of state was a

permanent chair of the Pan American Union’s board of governors until
1923, when the United States finally agreed to a rotation system, and
then in effect remained so by virtue of a peculiar internal politics of defer-
ence that saw the Latin American ambassadors repeatedly vote as chair the
US secretary of state; and most obviously, the fact that the United States
undertook its Pan American project in the era of its occupation of
Caribbean and Central American countries, the corollary to the Monroe
Doctrine, and dollar diplomacy: all this was more than sufficient to make
Latin American actors suspicious if not distrustful of US intentions and to
lead them, furthermore, to regard the Pan American Union as something
that was not exactly theirs.
The Pan American Union had a long run, lasting 38 years, until it was
dissolved in 1948 at the Ninth International Conference of American
States in Bogotá and formally refashioned into the Organization of
American States. With US  Secretary of State George Marshall’s eco-
nomic recovery plan for Europe, the founding of the United Nations,
and the onset of the Cold War, the Pan American Union, simply put,
had outlived its usefulness and relevance. The idea of an imagined north
and south collaborating, of, as set forth by its ambitious trilingual bul-
letin, an English-speaking and Portuguese-and Spanish-­speaking hemi-
sphere engaged together in a common project as executed by the Pan
American Union could only have seemed to US politicians and strate-
gists emerging from World War II as the quaint dream of an era gone by.
For devout Pan Americanists, it was an era that barely had time to real-
ize its promise, as evident in examples of the many Pan American proj-
ects that had quickly fizzled out or been repurposed. Of these, there is,
perhaps, no better example than the Good Neighbor Policy.
As Eric Paul Roorda demonstrates in the case of US relations with the
Dominican Republic, respect for the sovereignty of other nations’ territo-
ries, the essence of the policy announced by Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR)
in his augural address of 1933, was manipulated by a generation of
Caribbean dictators, who understood that as long as they remained in the
camp of the United States, they would benefit, as seen in the case of the
Dominican Rafael Trujillo who not only received “consultation, loans,
and military assistance” but who also built his foreign policy and public
image around it, thereby dominating his own people all the more effec-
tively.14 Whatever the Good Neighbor Policy devolved into in the 1930s,
238  R. T. CONN

though, in the post-war period the political principle of cooperation it

professed was raised to a new level when the Organization of American
States came into being under a United Nations sub-charter that mandated
non-intervention. With regard to its status as an enforceable document,
the sub-charter would suffer from the same weaknesses as the charter of
the U.N. but much more so.
As William D. Rogers underlined in 1988 at the time of the OAS’s 40th
anniversary celebrated against the backdrop of the Sandinista Revolution
and the US-backed counter-revolutionary group that opposed it, a conflict
that was being mediated by the Contadora Group, not the OAS, whose
mission it was to arbitrate inter-American state conflicts in the first instance,
OAS principles had been disrespected many times by the United States and
other member nations. With no action being taken by the OAS—ham-
strung as it was particularly by the United States, and with entities having
arisen over time to fill the void created by non-OAS action such as Human
Rights Watch, the Contadora Group, already mentioned, and other ad hoc
mediating groups—the organization needed to rethink its purpose.15
Whether or not the OAS during the decades of the Cold War was, as
Rogers and others have pointed out, an institution in crisis, its mission at
once supported and undermined by the United States, it is important to
understand exactly what makes the organization different in structure
from Rowe’s and Barrett’s Pan American Union. To start, the Pan
­American Union consisted of a vast administrative apparatus presided
over by a governing board that operated in secrecy. In contrast, the OAS
is a political institution that is under the jurisdiction of the United
Nations and is run by a council. The Pan American Union promised the
achievement of modernity through interaction within one and the same
system of knowledge, as made possible by its ambitious bulletin. It was a
system that was Enlightenment-inspired, propelled by the commitment
to the sharing of knowledge across the fields and made possible by the
rise of US corporations and the domination of the US military. The OAS
has as its mission inter-state dialogue and conflict resolution, lacking,
therefore, anything approximating the administrative role that was the
province of the Pan American Union; by no stretch of the imagination
can it be regarded as a projection of US power in the way its predecessor
could have been. Another important difference is on the cultural front.
The Pan American Union, interwoven as it was with the United States
 9  PAN AMERICANISM ABOVE GROUND: BOLÍVAR IN THE UNITED STATES  239

and international academy and with the arts and culture, enjoyed no
small prestige among scholars, writers, and the like, respected even by
many among the intellectual elites from the liberal center in Latin
America, some who had a very public friendship with the second director
general, Leo Rowe, such as Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral, winner of the
Nobel Prize in 1945. Nothing of the kind can be said about the OAS,
which bears no relationship to the international academy or to the fields
of the arts and whose parliamentary structure prevents its secretary gen-
eral from developing the profile of a Barrett or a Rowe. Finally, related to
all this is their geographic scope.
The Pan American Union consisted of 21 states, all Iberian descended,
except for Haiti. Brazil enjoyed no small amount of prominence in the Pan
American Union, receiving particular attention in the Pan American bul-
letin in the 1920s, a time when Brazil’s most important trading partner
was Great Britain and the United States was seeking market share. The
OAS would consist of all the states of the Americas, including the French-
and English-speaking countries of the Caribbean as well as Belize and
Canada, going from the 21 states of its predecessor to 36. The idea of a
“north” that signified the United States alone was no more. The idea of a
“south” conceived, as it had been by the United States and Pan American
actors, as exclusively Iberian descended fell too.
The Ninth International Conference of American States in Bogotá in
April of 1948, of which we have just spoken, could not have been more
fraught with meaning for a nation, a hemisphere, and the world.
Secretary of State George Marshall, immortalized in film clips arriving
at the conference, saw to it that the conference occurred right at the
moment that his European Recovery Program went into effect. But the
conference, which was to serve as the international stage where the Pan
American Union was to be officially dissolved and the OAS officially
created, representing the end of one order and the beginning of another,
had blood on the hands of its organizers, taking place as it did during
the most momentous event in the history of twentieth-century
Colombia, the assassination of Colombia’s beloved populist Liberal
leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán at the hands, there can be no doubt about
it, of a sector of the Colombian elites that desired to rid from the
national stage a figure who had brought the masses into the Liberal
Party and commanded them there on the national stage.
240  R. T. CONN

The reaction to the assassination, three days of rioting known as the

bogatazo, marks the beginning of the ten-year period called La Violencia,
a civil conflict in which thousands of individuals lost their lives in battle in
the countryside. On paper the conflict came to an end in the late 1950s,
resolved into a carefully crafted political structure that called for the Liberal
and Conservative Parties to share control of the executive, with one party
following the other at the end of each presidential term, but it had simply
been institutionally displaced, the populist forces that Gaitán had brought
into the Liberal Party having been expelled and now existing entirely out-
side that party structure as the armed Left. At the conference, Secretary of
State George Marshall wasted no time in elevating communism to the
status of an inter-state threat, just as his predecessors had from the late
1930s through the end of the war fascism, using as a vehicle for this the
Pan American Union. His recovery plan loomed large with Latin American
countries expressing deep concern about a United States that was turning
away from the hemisphere.
In the years ahead, not having anything like the administrative func-
tionality of the Pan American Union in the new OAS to draw on and
needing anyway the ability to operate worldwide with a free hand, the
United States produced new institutions to pour money into the countries
of the world to combat communism. Kennedy in the early 1960s, as part
of the US Cold War strategy, established the United States Agency for
International Development (USAID) to centralize the flow of US monies
to countries the United States considered in danger of falling under the
influence of communism. Latin America was of particular importance to
Kennedy. In response to the Cuban Revolution, Kennedy also established
the Alliance for Progress, a program that encouraged development, demo-
cratic governments, and thereby allegiance to the liberal order, with US
taxpayer dollars going directly to several countries, including Bolivia.
Bolivia, in fact, became a test case for the Cold War in Latin America, held
up on the international stage by the United States as a model “underde-
veloped nation” on the path of liberal democracies but in danger of suc-
cumbing to communism just as Cuba had. The global mechanism that was
USAID, of course, was not the only institution in place. It had a counter-
part that had been in existence for more than a decade. We refer to the
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), inspired by the Office of Strategic
Services (OSS) and signed into law in 1947 by President Harry S. Truman.
From the 1950s through the 1980s, the CIA played a major role in Latin
America, creating new regimes, orchestrating surrogate wars, and influ-
 9  PAN AMERICANISM ABOVE GROUND: BOLÍVAR IN THE UNITED STATES  241

encing public opinion. The United States was now pursuing its interests
literally “underground,” out of site from the repackaged building on
the Ellipse.
The story of hemispheric relations in the context of the Pan American
ideal in the final moments of the nineteenth century and through the first
half of the twentieth can be summarized as follows: First, there were the
International Conferences of American States, orchestrated across Latin
America between the 1890s and the early 1950s by the United States and
referred to, to this day, particularly by US actors, as Pan American confer-
ences. As has been pointed out by several scholars, these conferences,
intended by the United States to produce the image of a truly federal
union of nations, not infrequently became sites of contestation by non-­US
American social and government actors who sought to express the inter-
ests of their groups, nations, and regions. In a clear expression of the
ambivalence of the Latin American states about their membership in the
Union of American Republics, by the end of 1920 all were already mem-
bers of the ill-fated League of Nations established only the year before,
hopeful that they would be able to play Washington and Geneva off each
other. Second, there was the headquarters of the secretariat of which we
have already spoken, the Pan American Union Building in Washington,
D.C., now the Organization of American States Building, a beautiful
Beaux Arts structure only two blocks from the White House that inte-
grated into its design symbols from the indigenous cultures of Mexico and
Central America, and eventually featured on the second floor of its interior
statues of the “founding fathers” of the member nations. Third, there was
the building’s Columbus Memorial Library, the name a reflection of the
classicizing desires of Barrett and the architects, which was intended to
provide US politicians, diplomats, and scholars with books and materials
about and from the region, many donated by Latin American govern-
ments. Fourth, there was the Pan American Union’s famous bulletin
(1910–1948), a successor of the journal of the previous secretariat and
published in English, Spanish, and Portuguese, which supplied US manu-
facturers and businesses with detailed information about developments in
the areas of politics, education, and mining, as well as such infrastructure
as roads, telephone cable lines, electricity, sewage, and sanitation in the
Latin American republics. Major US corporations had beaten the US gov-
ernment to the punch through their activities in Brazil, Mexico and Cuba
in the 1880s and the 1890s, but the latter was now playing catch up, try-
ing to produce a kind of symbiosis between the two sectors while helping
242  R. T. CONN

US manufacturers, as in the years immediately after the World War, when

it encouraged them to be aggressive in obtaining new contracts and hold-
ing on to old ones with European businesses returning to Latin America.
Fifth, there was the Pan American highway, suggested at the Fifth
International Conference of American States (1923) and supported and
financed by the United States during the 1940s and 1950s. Sixth, there
was the short-lived Pan American Labor Federation of the 1920s, led by
Samuel Gompers, which sought to bring into its fold labor unions in
Mexico and Central America. In accordance with the peace-driven ideals
and utopias of the inter-war period, the federation spoke of the interna-
tional organization of labor as a bulwark against war-hungry governments
at the same time that it supported the developmentalist strategy of dollar
diplomacy in the Caribbean, endorsing the US-supported coup in Cuba in
1933, the so-called Revolt of the Sergeants that brought Fulgencio Batista
to power, and remaining silent on larger issues of continued US domina-
tion in the Caribbean and Central America. And, finally, to give one last
example of the power of the Pan American ideal, we cannot forget, on the
commercial front, Pan American Airways (Pan Am), which was founded
on March 14, 1927, and whose first routes were to Havana and San Juan,
a powerful symbol not just of the omnipresence of a cultural and political
term, but also of the consumer network in Latin America desired by US
corporations and Washington. In the 1950s and 1960s, Pan Am was key
to the US international civilizing mission.16

Which Brings Us to Bolívar

It was in the context of these diplomatic, cultural, institutional, and com-
mercial undertakings, all of which defined the Pan American period, that
Bolívar became a privileged object of reflection, featured in the Colombian
and Venezuelan history entries of the Pan American Union bulletin, writ-
ten about by the new historians of Latin America fascinated with the
region’s leaders of independence, celebrated at key moments by a United
States in need of individual, mythical figures to promote its national inter-
ests in the hemisphere, paid tribute to at the moment of the centenary
celebration of his death in 1930 by the Pan American Union and by insti-
tutions in Latin America and Europe, and written about with almost fetish-
istic care from the time of the centenary through the 1950s by a range of
writers, humanist scholars, and essayists who took advantage of the sudden
and quickly accumulating currency of Bolívar’s figure to promote their
 9  PAN AMERICANISM ABOVE GROUND: BOLÍVAR IN THE UNITED STATES  243

agendas. Throughout these years, 1928–1959, Bolívar appeared dressed in

different garb, from the great military leader to the statesman, from the
liberal democrat to the dictator, in a process in which intellectuals from
various nations participated and in which the object that was Latin America
was increasingly identified in cultural discourse with his figure. Such, in
fact, was the force of the Bolívar phenomenon that Leo Rowe in 1938 did
something that he perhaps would not have been capable of doing in years
past, committed as he was to giving equal weight in the publications and
visual representations of the Pan American Union to the individual nations
of Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking Latin America. He brought out an
edition in Spanish of “all the conventions, recommendations, reports and
motions adopted by the six American International Conferences, as well as
a recompilation of the agreements and resolutions adopted by several Pan
American technical conferences held between 1889 and 1930,” with an
introduction celebrating the Bolívar of the 1826 Panama Congress by
James Brown Scott, director of the International Division of Law of the
Carnegie Foundation for International Peace.17 Previous to this, at the
conference of American states meeting in 1933 in Montevideo, an act was
passed acknowledging Bolívar as one of the great statesmen of the Americas.
But let us back up for a moment. The early part of the twentieth cen-
tury was not the first time Bolívar had made his way into US discussions.
In fact, during his own lifetime, in what could be described as the first
Bolívar craze, he received attention in the United States from the likes of
Henry Clay, Thomas Jefferson, and Daniel Webster, all of whom champi-
oned him, echoing writers, artists, and statesmen from the times in Europe.
That intense interest, of which the Venezuelan Rufino Blanco Fombona
authoritatively writes to document the importance that his countryman,
Bolívar, once had in the United States, saw US papers and journals publish
news of his exploits. It was coincident with Bolívar’s establishment of the
Third Republic in 1817 in Angostura, today Ciudad Bolívar, and his three
major victories: first at Boyacá, August 7, 1819; then at Carabobo, June
24, 1821; and finally, at Ayacucho, December 9, 1824.
The year 1825, when the Liberator was at the height of his glory, is
interesting in this story of the first Bolívar craze, for it is the year when
several newly formed small towns including Friendship in Alleghany
County, New York and Hatchie in Hardeman County, Tennessee changed
their names to Bolívar, the latter by order of the state legislature, which
was urged to do so, no doubt, by the state’s US senator, Henry Clay. Not
surprisingly, though, the towns that paid tribute in this way to the leader
244  R. T. CONN

of South-­ American independence only a generation later would find

themselves in a toponymical time warp. The national interest that had
brought Bolívar to their attention as a symbol of liberty evaporated after
the break-up of the Gran Colombia and the leader’s death in 1830.
A different story occurred in Europe where discussion of his figure
went on unabated through his final years and well into the 1830s, pro-
pelled by new critical terms and concerns. There, admiration turned not
to indifference, as it did in the United States, but to critique, with Benjamin
Constant and other writers now attacking the hemispheric leader who had
embodied the spirit of liberalism for establishing his dictatorship of 1828.
One voice that was critical of Bolívar did appear in the United States, but
this was the exception that, as they say, proves the rule.
We are referring to the Frenchman Henri Louis La Fayette Villaume
Ducoudray Holstein, who well before 1828 had begun work on a volume
that would show the “folly” of Bolívar’s US admirers. Perhaps the most
important of Bolívar’s detractors, Ducoudray Holstein had served under
Napoleon and Bolívar’s Granadan rival Castillo, fought in a secret war for
the United States against Spain in Puerto Rico, and remained in the
United States to become a professor of Romance Languages and
Literatures at Geneva College (renamed Hobart College in 1852) in
Geneva, N.Y.  In his 400-page tome, published in Boston in 1829 and
which would later serve as the primary source for Marx’s famous 1858
encyclopedia entry, Memoirs of Simón Bolívar, President Liberator of the
Republic of Colombia, and of his principal generals; secret history of the
Revolution and the events which preceded it, from 1807 to the present time.
With an introduction containing an account of the statistics and the present
situation of said republic, education, character, manners, and customs of the
inhabitants—he lambasts Bolívar as vain, arbitrary, cruel, cowardly, and
dictatorial.18
In the years following Ducoudray Holstein’s intervention, in fact, for
the remainder of the nineteenth century, publications about Bolívar were
few and far between in the United States. In March 1870, a scholarly
article appeared in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine that presented the
leader as anti-church and the church as royalist.19 Decades later, in 1903,
when it was thought by some that Argentina could compete with the
United States for hemispheric economic dominance, “a land of opportu-
nity” for immigrants, a book featuring San Martín, Bolívar, and Miranda
came out. Entitled The Independence of the South-American Republics: A
Study in Recognition and Foreign Policy, its author, Frederic L.  Paxson,
draws a clear line between the merits of San Martín and the demerits of
 9  PAN AMERICANISM ABOVE GROUND: BOLÍVAR IN THE UNITED STATES  245

Bolívar in a vision reflective of the high expectations for the Argentine

economy that continued through the 1920s and of the bloodbath that was
the Revolución Libertadora in Venezuela (1901–1903). Bolívar, who
achieves independence but who is clearly second in importance to San
Martín when judged by the criterion of leadership qualities, begins his
dictatorial career, as Paxson puts it, on August 4, 1813, when after enter-
ing Caracas he does not follow the orders of the Congress of New Granada
that he serves, calling an assembly of notables rather than reconstituting
the 1811–1812 Congress of Venezuela, an assembly to which he “resigns
into their hands his authority” and which, as expected, we are told, imme-
diately reinvests him with dictatorial power, a power that will be his until
New Granada and Venezuela are united.20
In contrast, Paxson describes San Martín as a leader who is modest in
his use of power, having little personal ambition; who knows how to pur-
sue and achieve victory without resorting to violence, as when he waits out
royalists holed up in the fort of the port city of Callao near Lima; who
decides at his 1822 meeting with Bolívar at Guayaquil that Latin American
independence cannot have two leaders, and that he must, then, make the
sacrifice of giving up his command; and who respects civilian authority
enough to be sure to resign his supreme authority officially at a meeting of
Peru’s First Congress.21 Paxson also weaves his preference for San Martín
into his model for third-party recognition of new states. The US-purported
concern not to recognize the Argentine state before the “proper time”
and San Martín’s insistence upon keeping a distance from the political
affairs of Peru are examples of how “third-party” figures and nations
should act.
Also worthy of note is a text published in 1909 by the explorer, ama-
teur archaeologist, and future founder, as he would be known, of Machu
Picchu (1911), World War I hero and US senator from Connecticut,
Hiram Bingham, detailing the crossing of the Andes he made following
the same route taken by Bolívar in 1819: The journal of an expedition
across Venezuela and Colombia, 1906–1907; and exploration of the route of
Bolívar’s celebrated march of 1819 and of the battle-fields of Boyacá and
Carabobo.22 In the spirit of Pan Americanism, Bingham, of whom we
spoke in relationship to José Gil Fortoul in Chap. 5, wanted to come to
terms with this newly found American hero, to see for himself what his
miraculous crossing of the Andes represented as a human accomplish-
ment and ultimately how then Bolívar might compare to famed military
leaders from Europe and classical times. Bingham was constituting Bolívar
246  R. T. CONN

as an historical object, one more Latin American monument to know in

his exploration of the region. But he also had his ear to the ground. He
wrote an essay at this time that sought to explain why Latin America was
not one vast federation, why it had broken up into individual republics,
adopting the US Constitution but not creating larger states.
One of the first US American historians of Latin America, William
Spence Robertson, when producing his 1918 work, Rise of the Spanish-­
American Republics as Told in the Lives of Their Liberators,23 portrays
Bolívar in a sense just as Paxson did, that is, as one among several impor-
tant liberators or foundational figures, including the Venezuelan
Francisco de Miranda, the Mexican Miguel Hidalgo, the Argentine
Mariano Moreno, the Mexican Agustín de Iturbide, the Argentine José
de San Martín, and the Venezuelan Antonio José de Sucre. For him, as
for other historians like Percy Alvin Martin, whose scholarship was also
explicitly tied to the Pan American project and who likewise had before
him the events of the Mexican Revolution together with those of the
World War, the mission of the historian was not only to “introduce” the
“south” to the “north” in terms that were comprehensible to a north-
ern reader and to promote the idea of a brotherhood of American
nations, but also, then, to provide the US reader with biographical
sketches of the important figures of the region. Designating biography
as a vehicle for the writing of history, Robertson details the political
forms that took shape in the transition from the colonial period to inde-
pendence, ranging from centralized republics to dictatorships. Bolívar,
inspired by Montesquieu, had speculated on the states that would come
into being in the Jamaica Letter of 1815. Now Robertson reports from
the vantage point of the future about which Bolívar conjectured. As for
the Spanish Cortes, Robertson rarely misses an opportunity to state that
Latin American independentists rejected it as being in the end non-
inclusive. Spain represented the old regime, plainly and simply.
Robertson describes Miranda as the larger-than-life Venezuelan, a
youthful 54-year-old in the moment of his return to his homeland, cele-
brating him for helping some Venezuelans “[awaken] to political self-­
consciousness” and as the Spanish-American leader of the era ideally suited
to “[transmitting] to South America the spirit, the doctrines, and the
methods of the French Revolution.”24
The book is hardly limited to the leaders whose names appear in the
chapter titles, as Robertson is producing a layered narrative including a
slew of important figures, all woven into the fabric of his biography-driven
 9  PAN AMERICANISM ABOVE GROUND: BOLÍVAR IN THE UNITED STATES  247

narrative. For instance, the chapter on San Martín begins with a discussion
of the Uruguayan hero, José Gervasio Artigas, whose speech denouncing
the Buenos Aires political elite for treating the Banda Oriental, what
would become Uruguay, as a province to be governed by a Roman-like
consul sent from Buenos Aires is reproduced verbatim.25 Robertson, then,
goes on to speak of San Martín, a leader, we are told, who was a “republi-
can at heart” but whose ideas about political system are transformed upon
returning from Spain, where he had served under Carlos IV and fought
Napoleon. To his surprise, San Martín finds that his fellow countrymen,
rather than seeking to establish a republic, as he had thought they would,
are negotiating with Spain and the United Kingdom for the establishment
of a constitutional monarchy with a prince from Europe as a ruler, this on
instructions from Gervasio Antonio de Posadas, Supreme Director of the
Second Triumvirate of the Provinces of the Río de la Plata (1814–1815).26
San Martín’s commitment to monarchy cannot be seen in isolation from
the political process in Argentina.
The case of the Argentine intellectual Mariano Moreno who was the
secretary of the 1810 junta or provisional government, which was fol-
lowed by the two triumvirates, and also a voting member of that body, is
especially interesting, his figure resonating throughout the narrative in the
way that Miranda, described as inspiring Chilean leader Bernardo
O’Higgins in the San Martín chapter, does. Robertson lavishes praise
upon Moreno, describing his commitment to a number of Enlightenment-­
inspired concepts and endeavors: to equality, as seen as in his publication
of Rousseau’s Social Contract;27 to free trade, as seen in his public state-
ments in support of the need to lower tariffs for British commercial ves-
sels; to free speech, as seen in his role as editor of, and contributor to, the
Gaceta de Buenos Aires, the new weekly periodical of the 1810 junta in
which he published articles on freedom of thought, on the need for a con-
stitution, the laws of the Indies being insufficient, and on the need to
establish a government defined by a division of powers, and in which, in
his role as editor, he included “extracts from newspapers of Europe and
North America”;28 and finally, his commitment to liberal learning, as seen
in his appointment as the director of the first Buenos Aires public library,
“the founder,” then, as he emphasizes, “of the national library of
Argentina.”29 Robertson also states that had Moreno not been ­marginalized
by those with whom he served in the junta, namely its president, Cornelio
Saavedra, whom he critiqued for wearing vice-regal garb, Argentine inde-
pendence would have occurred earlier than it did. But this hero that a US
248  R. T. CONN

reader could cheer had his life cut short when he died of natural causes en
route to London to represent the junta.
Concerned to find ways to expand the pantheon he is constructing,
Robertson includes at the end of the chapter on Moreno a profile of the
Latin American leader who represents non-republican government to the
extreme, the Paraguayan José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, justifying the
excursus by the fact that Buenos Aires had sought to include in its new
government Paraguay, which had belonged to the viceroyalty of the Río de
la Plata. As he must, he denounces Dr. Francia, as he called himself, stating
that he was a cruel dictator who arbitrarily executed thousands of
Paraguayans. But Robertson also creates a compelling portrait of him in the
same way that he does of all the figures about whom he speaks, describing
him in terms that would have intrigued a US readership. He does this in
part through the words of a Swiss physician who, after visiting Paraguay and
meeting the leader, published an article in which he describes Francia as a
kind of enlightened despot who prefers Napoleon to the Bourbon monar-
chy and who despises the church, his commitment to independence and
secularization firm.30 At the end of the chapter, desiring to reconnect this
excursus to his discussion of Moreno by more than the fact that Paraguay
had been part of the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata, he contrasts the two
as having political visions representing opposite forms of government.
In examining the intellectual work Robertson performs in other chap-
ters, we see that he also identifies moments in the Latin American inde-
pendence movement when the “old regime” can be seen to give way to
the new with only minimal violence. An example of this is his rendering of
the Mexican Iturbide, to whom he dedicates an entire monograph in the
1950s.31 Here is a successful politician who unlike Hidalgo and Bolívar
does not use violence to achieve his goals. Robertson would leave out the
fact that it was the threat of violence, particularly the masses rising up
against the elites that encouraged if not propelled the Conservatives or
royalists to “institute” independence. But he would underline the irony
that Iturbide who had been ousted from power by the Mexican people
after declaring himself emperor of Mexico should return to Mexico in
1823, concerned to save his people from the possibility of attack by the
Holy Alliance, whose ability to do so he had overestimated, only to be
executed. The decision to use Bolívar, Miranda, and Sucre for three of the
seven chapter titles, particularly the less than obvious selection of Sucre,
shows a scholar who is following trails already blazed by Venezuelan actors
with their claims of ownership over the independence process. But the
 9  PAN AMERICANISM ABOVE GROUND: BOLÍVAR IN THE UNITED STATES  249

selection of leaders from Mexico—Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla and Agustín

de Iturbide—for titles of two chapters and the referencing of other
Mexican leaders may indicate his own motivation in deciding about which
leaders to include and exclude. His 1918 volume could well have been
subtitled, “U.S. involvement in the Mexican Revolution.” In 1916,
Woodrow Wilson ordered US Major General John G. Pershing to enter
Mexican territory to pursue Pancho Villa in response to attacks led by him
on US companies and the border town of Columbus, New Mexico, pay-
back by Villa for US recognition in 1915 of his rival, Venustiano Carranza.
The multi-centered, panoramic focus on the leaders of Latin America
aspired to by Robertson and also by Pan Americanism writ large, aptly
symbolized by the Gallery of Patriots at the Pan American Union Building
and the etched names in the crown molding high above the inner court
yard, would be reaffirmed when following World War I the movement
came to have three new catalysts.
The first two, pointed to by Marc Berger and others in relation to the
movement’s new momentum, were, on the one hand, the United States’
new unfettered access to Latin American markets; and on the other hand,
the perception of the beginnings of a hemispheric infrastructure, as sig-
naled by the completion of the Panama Canal in 1914.32 The third factor
was the Pan American Union, which had played an important role for
Woodrow Wilson during the World War by facilitating the building of
hemispheric alliances and could well have been a source of inspiration for
the US leader’s League of Nations, particularly if the president had his ear
to any of the speeches delivered by John Barrett in which the director
general told his audiences how the Europeans could have avoided war had
they been able to count on something equivalent to his regional union.33
The Monroe Doctrine loomed large during the entirety of the Pan
­American Union’s existence. Barrett, in 1914, motivated by the desire
both to position the Pan American Union as a mediator of hemispheric
conflict, particularly the Mexican Revolution, and to grease the wheels of
commerce in Latin America, spoke of “consensualizing” the Monroe
Doctrine, proposing that all member nations endorse what had come to
be the basis of Roosevelt’s and Taft’s military interventions in the
Caribbean and Central America as a doctrine of mutual defense.34
A few years earlier, Rowe, in a different context, had recommended
that the United States jettison the doctrine in favor of multiple policies
toward Latin America, each defined by the United States’ specific eco-
nomic and political concerns in the nation or region in question. Divide
250  R. T. CONN

and conquer, some might say. Seeking to update US policy in a different

way, Hiram Bingham, in a 1913 treatise in which he describes the Monroe
Doctrine in the title as a shibboleth, expresses a desire for the US govern-
ment to be done with it once and for all, the threat of European nations
making claims on territory of the Americas long gone and its invocation
only muddying the waters by creating the conditions for Latin Americans
to see any US action or initiative, however remote from the doctrine,
through its prism.35
In Europe and Asia, there was engagement with it as well. In 1914,
A. Pillet of the Law Faculty at the University of Paris spoke of how as a
young man he had been disgusted with the Monroe Doctrine, but that
now, in the context of rising national tensions and the prospect of war, he
looked upon it very positively for its role in guaranteeing regional peace
when individual nations could not.36
For its part, the expansionist Japanese state cited the doctrine as a prec-
edent for its claims that no non-Asian country should take territory or
influence internal politics in the Pacific Rim.37 The event that was being
referred to was the 100-day occupation in 1900 of Beijing, China by an
eight-nation alliance of Western powers to create a safe haven for nationals
attacked by a weak Qing imperial state momentarily under the sway of
nationalist warlords of the Boxer Rebellion.
Leo S. Rowe, whose first 12 years as the director of the Pan American
Union coincided with the administrations of Warren G. Harding, Calvin
Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover and later years with those of Roosevelt
and Truman, found himself in a political world dominated, then, by the
Monroe Doctrine. Working to establish a set of hemispheric practices that
perhaps would put the doctrine out of the minds of policy makers, he
gave his heart and soul to the union, faithfully carrying out the mission of
creating dialogue among the member nations in contexts as different as
the Roaring Twenties, the Good Neighbor Policy and Great Depression
of the 1930s, and World War II. In his scholarship, to which he remained
committed, he sought to create a vision that would accentuate and respect
the differences among Latin America’s nations, and with this, the struc-
tural components that in each case would be required to build responsive
and responsible republican traditions, producing an array of texts includ-
ing a monograph about the Argentine Bartolomé Mitre and a special
issue of the Pan American bulletin dedicated to the Venezuelan Francisco
de Miranda as well as forwards for several volumes, such as one for an
English-­language translation of a Mexican work comparing the Mexican
Constitution of 1857 to that of 1917. Interestingly, in his 1921 book
 9  PAN AMERICANISM ABOVE GROUND: BOLÍVAR IN THE UNITED STATES  251

about Mitre, Rowe faults Argentina for having more political parties than
needed, the result, as he saw it, of squabbles among the political elites,
recommending the country create a more rational party structure, one
responding to the concerns of large sectors of the public.38 With this,
Rowe may have hoped that a new political party would emerge capable of
defeating Hipólito Yrigoyen, the Argentine president who had defied Pan
Americanism against the advice of his ambassador in Washington, D.C.,
by keeping Argentina neutral during the war.
Rowe, in accordance with the imperative to recognize equally the
member states of the Pan American Union and to use the physical site of
the union’s building to this end, oversaw the process whereby the Pan
­American Union fulfilled the goal of completing the Gallery of Patriots,
requesting that each member nation contribute a bust of a national hero
to be placed in the gallery. He also ensured that each time a bust of a
leader from the independence period was received, the Pan American
Union bulletin ran a biographical piece about that personage. In most
cases, the important elements underlined in the bios were the individual’s
contributions to independence. When such connections could be posited,
Rowe or one of his staff oriented the narrative around the central hero
that was Bolívar, minimizing if not eliding tensions, conflicts, and discon-
nects between the hero represented and the Liberator. In the November
issue of 1920 in which Rowe’s appointment was announced, a piece ran
on the Pan American Union’s receipt of statues of Antonio José de Sucre
and Bernardo O’Higgins, the one from the Bolivian government, the
other from the Chilean.39
If Rowe in this way deployed Bolívar as a unifying element for the pur-
poses of creating a pantheon, his usage of Bolívar during his first decade
at the helm of the organization did not go beyond this, as signaled earlier
in regard to the 1938 edition of which we spoke; in fact, one notes a
desire not to attribute any more importance to Bolívar than to the other
leaders whose busts he received from the Pan American republics.
Subsequent to 1928, however, a radical change began to make itself
manifest, propelled by the Hoover administration, the Pan American
Union’s new Division on Intellectual Cooperation, approved at the Sixth
International Conference of American States in Havana the year before,
and in anticipation of the worldwide centenary celebration of Bolívar’s
death of 1930 of which we have repeatedly spoken. What just a few years
before would have been correctly viewed as circumstantial, having no par-
ticular importance other than that of the event itself and that of the insti-
tutions and government actors sponsoring it, peripheral, if you like, to the
252  R. T. CONN

ideological “substance” of the Pan ­American Union, in the Hoover and

FDR years acquired a certain discursive force. Writers and professional
and amateur historians, both affiliated and unaffiliated to the Pan
American Union, produced narratives about Bolívar in which the Liberator
went from being a not entirely uncontroversial hero of Latin America,
known first as belonging to Venezuelan and Colombian history, to the
symbol of Pan Americanism, representing in this capacity the consum-
mate statesman. The times, indeed, had changed. FDR in his inaugural
address of 1933 disavowed the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe
Doctrine, which had been so important during the first three decades of
the century to justify US interventions, but left intact the Monroe
Doctrine, which had in any case been the document cited by US American
actors more frequently than the corollary itself, more palatable for inter-
national consumption. As for Bolívar, years prior to this, the stage had
been set for his figure either to stand in for that of Monroe or to be paired
with it. That moment was the spring of 1921 when a Venezuelan state
that had just begun to grant concessions to the United States and
European powers for oil exploration, gifted yet another statue of Bolívar
to the city of New York, a statue that would be the occasion for multiple
new beginnings.

Notes
1. Acta de la sesión extraordinaria celebrada el 19 de Julio de 1983, aprobada
en la sesión del 9 de diciembre de 1983, Organización de los Estados
Americanos (Washington, D.C.: Secretaria General de la Organización de
los Estados Americanos), 1–23.
2. Ibid., 1–23.
3. See Lars Shoultz, Beneath the United States: A History of U.S. Policy Toward
Latin America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 282–283.
4. Joseph Byrne Lockey, Pan Americanism: its beginnings (N.Y.: The
Macmillan Co., 1920), 2–3.
5. See Frederick Pike, The United States and Latin America (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1992), 161–167.
6. See Marc Berger, “A Greater America? Pan America and the Professional
Study of Latin America, 1890–1990” in Beyond the Ideal: Pan Americanism
in Inter-American Affairs, Ed. David Sheinen (Westport: Greenwood,
2000), 45–46.
7. José Martí, “Congreso Internacional de Washington: su historia, sus ele-
mentos y sus tendencias,” in Nuestra América (Barcelona: Biblioteca
Ayacucho,1985), 48–55. (La Nación, Buenos Aries, 19 de diciembre de
1889).
 9  PAN AMERICANISM ABOVE GROUND: BOLÍVAR IN THE UNITED STATES  253

8. Joseph Smith, The United States and Latin America: A History of American
Diplomacy, 1776–2000 (London: Routledge, 2005), 45–50.
9. See “The Monroe Doctrine” Sacramento Daily Union, August 20 1864,
Volume 27, Number 4186.
10. For a discussion of the relationship between Canning and Monroe in the
context of British desires to position itself in relationship to the republics
of the New World, see H. W. V. Temperley “The Later American Policy of
George Canning,” The American Historical Review, 1906, 11, No. 4:
779–797.
11. See Robert Alexander González, Designing Pan-America: U.S. Architectural
Visions for the Western Hemisphere (Austin, University of Texas Press,
2011), 78.
12. Joseph Smith, “The First Conference of American States (1889–1890) and
the Early Pan American Policy of the United States” in Beyond the Ideal:
Pan Americanism in Inter-American Affairs, Ed. David Sheinin (Westport,
CT: Praeger, 2000), 27.
13. See Walter Scott Penfield, “The Legal Status of the Pan American Union,”
The American Journal of International Law, Apr. 1926, Vol. 20, No. 2,
257–262.
14. See Eric Paul Roorda, The Dictator Next Door: The Good Neighbor Policy
and the Trujillo Regime in the Dominican Republic, 1930–1945 (Chapel
Hill: Duke University Press, 1999), 1, 90, 128.
15. See pages 102–106  in Rogers, William D. and Hugo Caminos, and…,
1988, “The OAS Charter After Forty Years,” American Society of
International Law, Vol. 820, 101–121.
16. We see this corroborated by Betty Stettinius Trippe, wife of Juan Trippe,
the founder of Pan Am, in her published diary entitled Pan Am’s First Lady:
The Diary of Betty Stettinius Trippe (McLean, Virginia: Paladwr Press,
1996).
17. Conferencias Internacionales Americanas, 1889–1936 (Washington:
Dotación Carnegie para la Paz Internacional, 1938), vii.
18. Henri LaFayette Villaume Ducaudray Holstein, Memoirs of Simón Bolívar,
President Liberator of the Republic of Colombia, and of his principal gener-
als; secret history of the Revolution and the events which preceded it, from
1807 to the present time. With an introduction containing an account of the
statistics and the present situation of said republic, education, character,
manners and customs of the inhabitants (Boston: S.G. Goodrich, 1829).
19. See Eugene Lawrence, “Bolívar, Liberator of South America,” Harpers
New Monthly Magazine, March 5, 1870.
20. Frederic L. Paxson, The Independence of the South-American Republics: A
Study in Recognition and Foreign Policy (Philadelphia: Ferris and Leach,
1903), 79.
21. Ibid., 72–75.
254  R. T. CONN

22. Hiram Bingham, The journal of an expedition across Venezuela and

Colombia, 1906–1907; and exploration of the route of Bolívar’s celebrated
march of 1819 and of the battle-fields of Boyacá and Carabobo (New Haven:
Yale Publishing Association, 1909).
23. William Spence Robertson, Rise of the Spanish-American Republics as Told
in the Lives of Their Liberators (New York and London: D. Appletown and
Company, 1918).
24. Ibid., 62.
25. Ibid., 177–178.
26. Ibid., 186–188.
27. Ibid., 160–161.
28. Ibid., 153–161.
29. Ibid., 154.
30. Ibid., 171–174.
31. William Spence Robertson, Iturbide of Mexico (Durham: Duke University
Press, 1952).
32. Marc Berger, “A Greater America? Pan America and the Professional Study
of Latin America, 1890–1990” in Beyond the Ideal: Pan Americanism in
Inter-American Affairs, Ed. David Sheinen (Westport: Greenwood,
2000), 46.
33. John Barrett, Panama Canal: What It Is, What It Means (Washington,
D.C.: Pan American Union, 1913), 113.
34. John Barrett, “A Pan-American Policy: The Monroe Doctrine Modernized,”
Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, International
Relations of the United States, July, Vol. 54, 1–4.
35. Hiram Bingham, The Monroe Doctrine, An Obsolete Shibboleth (New Haven,
Yale University Press, 1913).
36. A.  Pillet, “The Monroe Doctrine,” Annals of the American Academy of
Political and Social Science, International Relations of the United States,
Jul., 1914, Vol. 54, 131–133.
37. “The Japanese Monroe Doctrine,” The Advocate of Peace (1894–1920),
Vol. 79, No. 11 December, 1917, 322–323.
38. Leo Stanton Rowe, The Federal System of the Argentine Republic
(Washington, D.C.: The Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1921).
39. “Busts of Sucre and O’Higgins in the Pan American Union,” Bulletin of the
Pan American Union, Washington, D.C., November 1920, 499–504. See
page 503 where Rowe or an assistant of his has O’Higgins go to ask Bolívar
for a command, having been retired on his ranch. Bolívar has no commands
to give but he bestows upon him the title of Grand Marshal of Peru.
 CHAPTER 10

A Rebirth

From the perspective of Venezuela, which had been using the figure of
Bolívar since the 1870s and 1880s as a state icon, the ceremony organized
to celebrate the unveiling could not have been a bigger success. US
American Sally Farnham, who won the commission from the Venezuelan
government in 1901, sculpted the statue over a period of 20 years. It was
the third equestrian statue of Bolívar to be given to the city by Venezuela
and to sit in a northwestern section of Central Park near 83rd Street known
then as Bolívar Hill, the first two having met with the displeasure of the
Central Park Commission. But if this, the third statue, was grander than the
first two, the ceremony that was the unveiling was certainly worthy of that
fact, used as it was as the occasion for the first speech of the recently inau-
gurated US President Warren G.  Harding. In that speech Harding cele-
brated the figures of Bolívar and Washington in the context of his call for a
renewed defense of the Monroe Doctrine.1 For a brand-­new administration
in search of an identity for its new super-power status in the aftermath of
the Great War, promoting the Doctrine without mention of the Roosevelt
Corollary, that is, as if the only document that was in effect and that existed
were Monroe’s 1823 Address, was tantamount to presenting a new national
project to the US public. The American public was being redirected
“south,” far away from Europe, in search of commerce and peace.
“Ready to Fight For Monroe Doctrine, Plans to Invite World
Disarmament Says Harding at Bolívar Unveiling,” reads the New York Times
headline of April 21, 1921.2 Harding used the event as an opportunity to

© The Author(s) 2020 255

R. T. Conn, Bolívar’s Afterlife in the Americas,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26218-1_10
256  R. T. CONN

whitewash the corollary established by Roosevelt and Taft, presenting the

United States as a protector of Latin America from a bellicose Europe,
prepared to sacrifice itself for that cause, but also as an “equal” partner in
commerce at a time when US Corporations like United Fruit and the US
State Department and military were mired in Honduran and Nicaraguan
politics, never mind the US occupation of Haiti (1915–1934) and the
Dominican Republic (1916–1924), with the corollary authorizing these
acts. To that end, he portrayed Bolívar and Washington, the two whose
busts stood opposite each other in the Gallery of the Patriots at the Pan
American Union, as the mirror image of each other, using the pair to
produce a vision of a hemisphere in which north and south shared the same
political, social, and economic agenda.
Latin America was not the virgin, primitive territory to be “uplifted” or
peoples who were racially inferior or backward, truer images of US views
on the vast and diverse region at the time whose cultural differences Rowe
emphasizes in his early scholarship and that would show up in works of
Pan Americanists, but so many individual nations with economic and cul-
tural interests similar to those of the United States. US corporations had
been investing heavily in Latin America since the 1880s, particularly in
commodities like copper and silver and such infrastructure items as roads
and railroads, all this mostly in export zones in Mexico, the Caribbean,
Central America, Peru, and Chile. As business historian Thomas F. O’Brien
tells us, in Central America the discipline of US corporate culture saw a
semi-proletarianization of peasants, with the seeds created for labor move-
ments which would eventually involve the fruit companies, with their mul-
tiple operations and close alliances with local governments. In Nicaragua,
revolutionary leader Augusto César Sandino, politicized by his own expe-
rience of working for US mining corporations in Mexico and Nicaragua,
would recruit from a mix of new Nicaraguan wage earners eager to join his
rebellion (1927–1933).3
Harding’s words do, though, reflect in part an economic and political
reality that placed “north” and “south” on the same playing field. US
manufacturers were establishing branch factories in the so-called ABC
countries—a term coined in 1914 in the moment Argentina, Brazil, and
Chile (ABC) conducted a mediation of the Mexico-US conflict at Niagara
Falls, Canada—in an effort to respond more successfully to consumer
markets there and particularly in Argentina, as Dudley Phelps writes in his
1936 Migration of Industry to South America.4 Others who delivered
 10  A REBIRTH  257

speeches at the unveiling included the New York City (NYC) mayor, the
New York governor, and the Venezuelan foreign minister, who later that
same day echoed Harding’s Central Park address at a dinner at the Hotel
Biltmore. Curiously, though, it was a Mexican-American intellectual
Guillermo A.  Sherwell who in 1921 published his Simón Bolívar (The
Liberator): Patriot, Warrior, Statesman, Father of Five Nations; A Sketch of
his Life and his Work, creating a version of Bolívar that reflected US geo-­
political interests.5
Sherwell had participated in the early years of the Mexican Revolution,
a member of the intellectual literary elite. Then, in 1915, escaping a death
sentence handed to him by the revolutionary leader Venustiano Carranza,
he fled to the United States. His Mexican mother and US American father
had registered him at a US consulate when he was born. Settling first in
NYC, Sherwell in just three years gained entry to State Department circles
as an advisor of sorts for Latin American affairs, with duties that included
writing for the Pan American Union bulletin.6 He also found his way into
the world of the US academy, securing a position as professor of Spanish
and Portuguese at Georgetown University. One article from a 1920 Pan
American Union bulletin stands out, a piece in which Sherwell exhorts US
businessmen to make a concerted effort to understand and accept Latin
American customs so as to increase the likelihood that they would con-
tinue to secure contracts for their products. For with German, French, and
British businesses returning to Latin American markets they had domi-
nated before the War, Sherwell warned US Americans not to be compla-
cent, reminding them that their superior position in the region was due
not to US business talent and savvy but to the momentary absence of
European competitors.7
In Sherwell’s book on Bolívar, published shortly after the dedication of
Sally Farnham’s bronze creation as a companion piece, Sherwell introduces
the US American public to Bolívar, explaining why he should be understood
as a world leader comparable in importance to Washington, Lincoln, and
Napoleon. He also introduces the public to Latin American culture and
history, providing information on the region’s racial make-up using the
categories of creole and mestizo while implicitly constructing US subjectivity
as white. The narrative he fashions is hemispheric. To perform Bolívar in this
manner, he uses the dyad of Bolívar and San Martín, placing San Martín as
second to Bolívar while depicting Bolívar as the one and only father of Latin
American independence. Guayaquil, so important in the Argentine tradition,
258  R. T. CONN

was a case in point. Sherwell characterizes the race to Guayaquil in 1822 as

one bearing on the ideological future of the region. The possibility that the
monarchist San Martín would unite Peru and Guayaquil made Bolívar
“hasten there to avoid any such compromise.”8 Here perhaps was the most
significant point of difference on which Sherwell capitalized to align Bolívar
with US interests. Bolívar was a republican through and through, though he
could be dictatorial; San Martín was a monarchist, just as were many of the
Argentine figures of independence, Sherwell tells his readers.9 Sherwell,
who does not qualify the word by stating that San Martín was a constitutional
monarchist, was playing to a US public uninterested in distinctions. Finally,
in what is a culmination of sorts in the argument, he adds that Argentina
sent a group of representatives to Potosí, Bolivia, in 1825 to express
gratitude to Bolívar for liberating Latin America. By sending these envoys,
Argentines in effect were acknowledging that Bolívar was the more
important of the two figures.10
No less significant is the manner in which Sherwell portrays Bolívar as
a leader. Sherwell presents Bolívar as a founder of civil society, able to rec-
ognize and celebrate the generals under him, to preside over political,
economic, and educational affairs when acting as protector of Peru in
1825 and 1826 (not as dictator, the status accorded him by the Peruvian
legislature, but protector, the status bestowed on San Martín) and able to
consider the possibility of liberating Cuba and Puerto Rico. An essentially
democratic figure, Bolívar is reluctant, we are told repeatedly, to hold
power, doing so only after ceding his authority to bodies, juntas, and
councils greater than he, and who as a result of his willingness to submit
to such authorities can be seen as being worthy of the power that time and
again is invested in him. As for the Ocaña Convention, Bolívar is charac-
terized as an innocent who was concerned only with defending the integ-
rity of Colombia: that his deputies left the congress to prevent a quorum
that would have allowed the majority Santander delegates to win the day,
and that the failure of the congress led to the conditions that saw Bolívar
declare a provisional dictatorship go unmentioned. To the contrary,
Sherwell presents Bolívar as generous, having no choice but to declare a
provisional dictatorship in the absence of a constitution, the Cúcuta
Constitution having been abrogated. And the individuals he appointed as
ministers for his dictatorship? Bolívar is extolled for his wisdom, including
the appointments from New Granada and for appointing Santander
ambassador to Washington, D.C., generous acts for which—if one could
believe this—he was repaid with the assassination attempt on his life, led—
 10  A REBIRTH  259

Sherwell was certain of this—by Santander.11 Finally, in an attempt to

ground the comparison of Washington to Bolívar in US American history,
Sherwell highlights Lafayette’s conveying of a Washington miniature to
Bolívar and creates a timeline in which to understand the “northern” lib-
eration process as one that was continuous with the “southern.”12 Bolívar
is presented not only as having won over the two parts of South America,
but also as having brought to a conclusion a process of liberation begun in
Lexington, Massachusetts in 1775.13 At the same time, as he states at the
end of his biography, San Martín had to be respected as a figure. In con-
trast to San Martín, who represented the old European model of constitu-
tional monarchy, Bolívar signified a modernity that could link a region to
the United States. Finally, he was rejected at the end of his life, but he was
generous like Lincoln, forgiving his detractors.
Sherwell was responding to a geo-political situation in the hemisphere
in which two distinct spheres of real and perceived influence had long
been in the making: that of the United States and that of Argentina.
Although Argentina had been an important supplier to the United States
during World War I and never given up its membership in the Pan
American Union when it flirted with membership in the League of
Nations, the United States could hardly count on the southern nation to
support its hemispheric goals. Tensions, in fact, in US-Argentina relations
dated back to the first conference of American States, as Harold F. Peterson
details in his exhaustive diplomatic history of the two nations.14 They
could also be seen more recently in President Yrigoyen’s stance of neutral-
ity in the Great War as well as in commentary by certain Argentine intel-
lectuals, most notably Manuel Ugarte, who had long been critiquing the
United States for its imperial actions in Latin America.
Publishing The Destiny of Latin America in 1911, just after the
announcement of the secretariat’s new identity at the Fourth International
Conference of American States in Buenos Aires in 1910, Ugarte explicitly
questions the right of the United States to lead the hemisphere. In addi-
tion to republishing excerpts from US bulletins showing US trade with
Latin America—the trade, he underlines, between Europe and Latin
America being much more significant—he argues that the heritage of
Argentina and other Latin American republics was Spanish, and further-
more, that the foundation for them had been laid long ago, in the north
by Bolívar and in the south by San Martín, with the two united in their
goals.15 Ugarte was playing the role of hemispheric protector, a role that
some actors in Latin American nations were assigning Argentina, among
260  R. T. CONN

them particularly those living the effects of dollar diplomacy in the

Caribbean and Central America, such as the Nicaraguan poet Rubén
Darío, for whom the southern nation represented nothing less than an
ideological bulwark against US interests and power.
The 1920s would see US capitalism go into full gear. Corporations,
backed by the US military, were already dominant in the production, dis-
tribution, and sale of fruit, but new corporations that would control other
areas were emerging such that by decade’s end the United States, having
made inroads throughout Latin America, would far exceed all European
nations in market share except Great Britain. Indeed, with Harding and
then Coolidge in the presidency and with Hoover as the secretary of com-
merce for both of their administrations, business and corporations could
not have been more supported than they were. In fact, Hoover, upon
making his famous trip to Latin America as president elect the fall of 1928,
was quoted by a New York Times reporter as saying that he felt completely
at home in the region precisely because he had spent so much of his time
in his cabinet minister role promoting US business there. As cars, then
planes caught the imagination of Pan American enthusiasts and ideo-
logues, Hoover during these years celebrated the building of so-called
automobile roads that could be traveled on by US-made vehicles. Sales in
cement mixers for road construction in Latin America, particularly in
regions in the US military and immediate industrial orbit such as Panama
and Mexico, skyrocketed. Among other initiatives, Hoover helped create
copyright law and standardize criteria for determining product weights, all
in the belief that Latin American countries held the promise of becoming
the United States’ most important trading partners. As for the vast think
tank that was Pan America, the political theorizing that fueled it kept
apace, with some among the faithful speculating in scholarly articles that
the building of roads would be not just the answer to the matter of the
region’s development but the solution to political instability as well,16 a
vision ironized brilliantly by the Argentine novelist César Aira in his novel
about the Panama port city of Colón in the 1920s, Varamo.17
In a Panama with massive unemployment and severe poverty, the canal
project having come to any end in 1914, Aira has the state use its new
roads and the automobiles that have come with them to stage road races
in which the objective is to travel at a constant speed, with those who go
too fast, accelerating in a non-constant manner, revealing themselves to be
its enemies, the so-called anarchists behind the social unrest and attempts
at unionization.
 10  A REBIRTH  261

In the Panama of that decade, Bolívar’s new hemispheric currency was not
lost on the country’s elites who, intrigued no doubt, by the Venezuela-­
sponsored 1921 dedication in NYC, convened in 1926  in Panama City a
Bolivarian Conference with the support of the Pan American Union. The
purpose was twofold: to dedicate a statue of the Liberator at the site of his
legendary, though unsuccessful, Panama Congress of 1826, Panama City, and
also to announce a project for a new university to be called the Universidad
Panamericana, a project that in the end never got any further than the plan-
ning stages. If this centenary celebration was supposed to bring prestige to the
23-year-old state and to stand as a statement of Panama’s place of centrality in
the new Pan American order, it did not come off as its organizers had hoped.
Tensions between “north” and “south” quickly made themselves manifest.
The United States may have yielded on the matter of its secretary of
state being permanent chair of the Pan American Union’s governing
board at the meeting of American States in 1923, but it had still done
nothing to shed its imperial garb, occupying, as it continued to, the
Dominican Republic and Haiti, and intervening with its marines in
Honduras and Nicaragua. As reported by Edward E. Curtis, a journalist
for The Nation, the speeches at the meeting were acerbic and accusatory,
with the Honduran delegate, Dr. Alfredo Trejo Castillo, warning of the
“colossus of the north” and the 18 Latin American delegates voicing their
agreement, obliging “him to rise and bow three times.” That was not all.
The greatest desire of the American States, according to Trejo Castillo,
was that Puerto Rico be granted independence, a statement that was
quickly transmitted to the president of the Independentist Party in Puerto
Rico, who cabled to the congress to urge it to support the resolution, but
which did not, thereby “shelving the whole business as containing too
much dynamite.” When it was the turn of the delegate from Nicaragua,
Dr. Daniel Gutiérrez Navas, he proposed that the headquarters of the Pan
American Union be transferred from Washington to Panama. “At once
the fat was in the fire,” wrote Curtis. “Everyone realized that Dr. Navas
was expressing a feeling widespread throughout Latin America that the
Pan American Union as at present located is too much under the thumb
of the State Department.” The only individual, we are told, who defended
the United States, insisting that the United States did not have any power
designs on his nation, was the president of Panama, Rodolfo Chiari, who
had a loan for his country pending at the National City Bank, the clearest
sign, as Curtis wanted his readers to see, of the enmeshment of the Latin
American republics with Wall Street in the era of dollar diplomacy.18
262  R. T. CONN

To read versions of the event other than the one by The Nation is not
only to get a different view of what occurred, but also to see the increasing
power of a tradition in formation. Carlos Castañeda, a US-based historian
who wrote about the centenary ahead of its celebration, obviously could
not report on the event itself, although had he penned his article after it
occurred, he may have foregone mention of the criticisms of the United
States expressed there, as others did. For Castañeda, here was the latest in
a distinguished series of meetings beginning with the Panama Congress of
1826 and including thereafter congresses and conferences that took place
in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, most importantly the
1889 Pan American Conference in Washington, D.C., as well as, of course,
the conferences of American States that followed.19
Sherwell’s book was republished at distinct moments in history. The
first, as we saw, was just months after the Venezuelan government officially
donated the statue of Bolívar to the city of New York, at the Byron
S. Adams Press in D.C. The second was on the occasion of the December
17, 1930, centenary celebration of Bolívar’s death, observed with great
fanfare in both Washington, D.C. and New York City as part of Hoover’s
Good Neighbor initiative.20
Front and center at this moment was the Pan American Union and the
multiple Pan ­ American societies. In Washington, D.C., at the Pan
American Union Building, Secretary of State Stimson, speaking in his
capacity as governor general of the Union and on behalf of Herbert
Hoover, declared that Bolívar was the true father of Pan Americanism. In
New York City the main ceremony occurred at Bolívar Hill and included
diplomats from throughout Latin America, with the exception of
Argentina. There were also many VIPs in attendance, including Juan
Trippe, founder and president of Pan American Airways. Not missing an
opportunity for publicity for his brand-­new company, Trippe, as reported
by the New York Times, had a wreath sent by plane to Santa Marta,
Colombia, the location of the historic house where Bolívar spent his final
days and where heads of state from the six Bolivarian nations (Panama
now presenting itself as part of that distinguished club of nations, the
country’s story of independence neatly displaced back to 1821 as if to
whitewash US involvement in the 1902 revolution) were gathered to cel-
ebrate the father of their nations and to make a commitment to unity. The
celebration of the centenary of Bolívar’s death was an opportunity for
Colombia’s Liberal Party, which had just defeated the Conservative Party,
 10  A REBIRTH  263

to regale.21 For its part, the Pan American Society, which organized the
Central Park ceremony, afterwards held a dinner at The Bolívar, a hotel
erected just four years earlier in 1926 on Central Park West and 83rd
Street, across from Bolívar Hill, and, since 1984, a residential co-op.22
Also worthy of note was the special mass, arranged by the Colombian
consulate, celebrated in Bolívar’s honor at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.23
The third time Sherwell’s book came out was in 1951, by commission
of the Bolivarian Society of Venezuela in Caracas,24 the year the Venezuelan
state contributed $218,400 to the city of New York for the Bolívar statue
to be moved from the western interior promenade of Central Park at 83rd
Street, where it had stood for 30 years, to its present location at the top of
6th Avenue or Avenue of the Americas,25 as it has alternatively been called
since 1945 when Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, seeking to transform
New  York City into a center for Pan Americanism while revitalizing an
avenue that under his tenure had been a commercial failure, created the
new identity for the thoroughfare. The title page of the third edition
reads, “Commemorative edition of the moving of the statue.” The book
represented when it appeared in 1921 a new beginning, the first book-­
length rendering of Bolívar in the United States since Ducoudray-­
Holstein’s scathing 1829 critique.26 Pan Americanism was not only
represented, then, by US figures like Leo Rowe, director general of the
Pan American Union from 1920 to 1946, but also by Latin American
figures like Guillermo A. Sherwell, eager to participate in expanding the
Pan American imagination using Venezuelan sources.
Sherwell’s 1921 book prepared the way for a series of publications,
almost all produced in the context of the centenary celebration of Bolívar’s
death and Hoover’s and Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policy. In addition to
the republication of Sherwell’s own work, there was T.  R. (Thomas
Russell) Ibarra’s 1929 Bolívar, The Passionate Warrior;27 Hildegarde
Angell’s 1930 Simón Bolívar, South American Liberator;28 Senator Hiram
Bingham’s address before the US Congress on Bolívar;29 Percy Alvin
Martin’s 1930 Stanford lecture, Simón Bolívar, The Liberator, where
Martin celebrates Bolívar as the first Pan Americanist, a great military
leader, and as the founder and president of the admirable Gran Colombia,
his Federation of the Andes said to be a mistake;30 the December issue of
the Pan American Union bulletin dedicated exclusively to Bolívar;31 and a
few years later Phyllis Marshall’s and John Crane’s 1933 children’s novel
264  R. T. CONN

The Dauntless Liberator.32 Soon thereafter there was also Víctor Andrés
Belaúnde’s 1938 Bolívar and the Political Thought of the Spanish American
Revolution;33 Thomas Rourke’s 1939 Man of Glory: Simón Bolívar;34 sub-
sequent to World War II, Gerard Masur’s 1948 Simón Bolívar;35 and
Waldo Frank’s 1951 Birth of a World: Bolívar in Terms of His Peoples.36

Expanding the Audience
How foreign texts become part of a national market is complex. By 1929
a French text published the previous year was already circulating in the
United States in translation. The author was Michel Vaucaire, who in
anticipation of the French-American Institute’s plans to receive a statue of
Bolívar from Venezuela as part of the 1930 centenary celebration and pay
tribute to the heroes of the Americas with busts had published in 1928 a
juvenile biography, Bolivar, el Libertador.37 If Sherwell, as we have said,
establishes an important Pan American interpretive line, Vaucaire, in the
context of an audience that was a subset of a larger adult one, expresses the
claims of France, which up until World War I had had important business
interests across the Atlantic and whose literary and cultural figures had
been a source of great prestige for the Latin American intelligentsia and
upper classes, from Émile Zola to Charles Baudelaire to Auguste Comte,
between the period of roughly 1880 and 1910.
Writing for a teenage audience, Vaucaire considers Bolívar from the
perspective of moral challenges faced and overcome. The issue Vaucaire
focuses on, and upon which he elaborates with strong Rousseauian over-
tones, is the matter of material wealth and the nation. The novel begins in
Europe with a Bolívar who is depressed and sickly but who is then uplifted
when he learns of his vast inheritance from his tutor, Simón Rodríguez.
Money, however, as Rousseau would have it, corrupts; and in Paris, we see
Bolívar as he enters the dissolute life and then miraculously escapes it. The
reader has occasion to view Bolívar in the salon of his “cousin” and confi-
dante Fanny, where he purportedly meets Humboldt who has just returned
from Caracas. Mention is also made of Humboldt’s alleged stay with
Bolívar’s family, which is said to have provided the German naturalist with
evidence of culture and cultivation in Latin America, not the barbarism
that the European public might expect. In accordance with Rousseauian
themes, we subsequently see Bolívar as he and Rodríguez make their pil-
grimage across the French countryside to Rome where Bolívar will pur-
portedly make his famous vow to liberate Latin America.
 10  A REBIRTH  265

Each of the scenes of Bolívar’s life and of independence is made to

revolve around the matter of morality, nation and wealth. When departing
from Le Havre, Bolívar is described as missing his “cousin” Fanny in Paris
and wanting to be with her but understanding that it is less than moral to
remain in a land that is not one’s own. With regard to questions involving
money, we see a Bolívar who at the end of his life is completely indifferent
to it, shown in fact giving up what he possesses either to friends or to
soldiers. When it comes to his landed wealth, we also see Bolívar in the
role of victim, dispossessed of his estates, now at the hands of the Spanish
in 1815, now at the hands of Venezuelans in 1830.
Interestingly, a section is devoted to Antonio Nariño, who was impris-
oned by the Spanish for publishing The Declaration of the Rights of Man.
Here was a Latin American hero who would resonate with a French public,
a figure in fact whose first act of martyrdom was the consequence of the
publication of a French document of world historic importance. But as
Vaucaire emphasizes, Nariño’s martyrdoms continued until the end of his
life when this “national hero,” the first person to be named vice-­president
of the Gran Colombia, suffers the greatest of indignities: impeachment for
corruption charges. Vaucaire uses this situation to dramatize Nariño’s
unparalleled self-sacrifice to the nation. In this, his last act of martyrdom,
we hear Nariño tell the Congress of Cúcuta of all the suffering that had
been brought upon him by his commitment to the world of ideas. In
Vaucaire’s rendering, Naríño is the “first victim to party jealousy,” a refer-
ence to the rivalry of the Liberal and Conservative Parties that would
define Colombian national politics.38
This was not the only juvenile biography about Bolívar to be produced
in the moment. The Venezuelan-American T.R. (Thomas Russell) Ibarra
in 1929 published a children’s biography of his own, Bolívar, The Passionate
Warrior. Ibarra, who was born in Caracas in 1880, in the United States
became a professional English-language writer, authoring Young Man of
Caracas in 1941, a memoir about the city in which he lived before moving
to Boston. Ibarra tells how his family fell victim to the caprices of the
country’s dictator and modernizer, Guzmán Blanco. As for his 1929 piece,
he presents Bolívar from the perspective of his intended readers, opposing
the so-called young Bolívar to the older Miranda and further appealing to
the imagination of his readers by speaking of his illustrious career as having
unfolded unexpectedly, his future one that could never have been
anticipated:
266  R. T. CONN

Anybody seeing the two on that day in 1810, and asked to guess which was
destined to greatness would have guessed beyond a doubt that fate was
reserving its laurels for that older man, grizzled, reserved, noble in brow and
carriage, listening gravely to the unbridled utterances of the youth by his
side—seeming no better than the spoutings of a demagogue, a dreamer.39

In the epilogue, Ibarra speaks of the future and promise of Latin

America as being that of Pan Americanism, defined by him as the large-
scale enterprise of road construction within and among individual nations,
an enterprise correcting deficiencies in communication that had been in
existence since independence.40 Connecting Latin America to its different
parts through roads, the obsession of the twenties, now defines the spirit
of Bolívar’s dream of unity, along with his 1826 Panama Congress.
For their part, Phyllis Marschall and John Crane, with their 1933 juve-
nile biography, The Dauntless Liberator: Simón Bolívar, seek to find in
Bolívar’s life “American” morality to teach to their adolescent audience. If
Vaucaire’s text taught French values right on Pan American soil, now
there was a US American text that, along with Ibarra’s, could clearly carry
forth the US agenda. When Bolívar, for instance, asks Miranda, without
the approval of the junta, to return with him to Venezuela to lead the mili-
tary action against the Spanish, Bolívar relies on good-old American self-
reliance, the same trait, the authors tell their young readers, that propelled
Bolívar throughout his career:

He utterly disregarded the wishes and orders of his superiors. Not only at
this time, but always in the years to come, whenever his own ideas went
beyond the sight of those who had a right to command him. If he could see
a purpose beyond their vision he went ahead, and the accomplishment
always justified his disobedience. His self-reliance was throughout his life a
dominant characteristic.41

Marschall and Crane’s explanation of Bolívar’s responsibility for the

loss of Puerto Cabello is also telling. They state that Bolívar had been
derelict in his duties when he was a young man but emphasize that the loss
of the fort did not have to result in the collapse of the First Republic, that
the fault was entirely Miranda’s, inasmuch as “he had five thousand soldiers
at his command as he sat there dejectedly on the step, but he did not lift
his hand or voice to order them to the relief of Puerto Cabello, scarcely
sixty miles away.” Was he bribed by the Spanish, asks the narrator? 42 It is
 10  A REBIRTH  267

not just that Bolívar is to be seen as Latin America’s counterpart to

Washington, but that US Pan Americanists are now digging into Bolívar
to assimilate him to US values. Bolívar is no longer simply the Latin
American equivalent of Washington, an exemplary figure to be consumed
by the public, serving as a mirror of the US conception of its “national”
morality. Indeed, Hoover’s words mourning Bolívar’s death and raising
him to the status of hemispheric icon were foundational.43

Víctor Andrés Belaúnde and the Search

for a Legal Tradition

Who would have thought that the person who would end up writing the
definitive treatise of the times in English on the political thought of Bolívar
would hail from a country like Peru where Bolívar had been assigned the
title of dictator, having been appointed as such twice by the Peruvian
Congress, and where, San Martín, the other hero of Peruvian independence,
had been assigned the title of protector? But such is the case. Scholar and
statesman Víctor Andrés Belaúnde, in exile in the United States in the
1920s, the period when the rival of his family, Augusto Leguía, was in
power as president, published in 1938 Bolívar and the Political Thought of
the Spanish American Revolution at the Johns Hopkins Press, a work based
in part on lectures he gave over several years at the Sorbonne, the University
of Miami, and Johns Hopkins University.44 Belaúnde had been drawing on
Bolívar’s writings and acts to support the liberal political ideas he presented
in books, essays, and addresses in Peru, a part of a generation that had
rediscovered Bolívar’s figure at the beginning of the twentieth century. In
the United States, Belaúnde would be able to draw on his deep knowledge
of Bolívar as he engaged with the phenomenon of interest he had occasion
to witness in Washington, D.C., and New York City. The Pan American
movement had paved the way for Sherwell to make his way into public life
in the United States; and it did the same for Belaúnde, giving him entrée
to academic posts and to the lecture podium in the 1920s. In 1930
Belaúnde contributed an article to the Pan American Union bulletin’s final
quarterly issue celebrating the centenary of the Liberator’s death and gave
the prestigious Albert Shaw Lecture in Diplomatic History at Johns
Hopkins University.45 During these years he also had before him the Latin
American cultural program instituted by Hoover between 1928 and 1932,
continued and capitalized upon by Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR).
268  R. T. CONN

Most symbolic of that program was Pan American Day, approved by

Hoover in 1930 and celebrated for the first time in 1931. Occurring on
April 14, the day on which the Pan American Union was founded, it
marked the beginning of a month-long slate of activities expressing inter-­
hemispheric awareness, with the executive of each “sovereign nation” giv-
ing the order on April 14 of each year that such activities commence. In
1943 a how-to book on Pan American Day for the benefit of chairmen
and chairwomen of Pan American clubs and schoolteachers was brought
out by Hilah Paulmier and Robert Haven Schauffler as part of a series that
included Thanksgiving, Christmas, Mother’s Day, and so on. The book
includes texts, ideas, and projects to use to celebrate the holiday.46 It was
given good reviews, though with one criticism, namely that the author,
perhaps, had gone too far by providing instructions for how to add the
stars and stripes to a pageant representing Bolívar’s vow on the Sacro
Monte in Rome.47
In the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, Pan American Day was celebrated
widely in the United States and Latin America. Today, it is no longer on
US school calendars and is completely unfamiliar, then, to the US public.
It remains, nevertheless, a tradition within the world of inter-state
protocol. In fact, over the past decades US presidents have issued the same
order that Hoover, Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower once did but with
the important difference that the White House has forgone having it com-
municated to schools and civic organizations, content to let it die a quick
death in press releases intended for foreign consumption. That order,
which President Barack Obama dutifully read on the April 14 of the last
year of his presidency, was that all organizations, beginning with the
schools, commit to learning about the historical figures of importance in
the “south.”48 The order has continued to be issued.
Coming from a Peru in which socialists José Carlos Mariátegui and
Victor de la Haya of the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance (APRA)
Party had emerged as major national voices, the one the architect of a
Bolshevik-inspired modernity built around Peru’s majority indigenous
populations, the other a visionary for trade unions, Belaúnde saw Pan
Americanism with its focus on independence as an opportunity to pro-
mote his conception of a modern Peru and to defeat a prejudice that had
taken root in the United States, namely that Latin America was incapable
of producing lawful leadership because of its colonial heritage. Belaúnde,
thus, was working on more than one front. If Pan American writers had
been busy since the late 1920s constructing a Bolívar representative of US
 10  A REBIRTH  269

political and cultural values, in his Bolívar and the Political Thought of the
Spanish American Revolution he takes the opportunity to present Bolívar
as being part of a tradition of Latin American and Spanish figures—writers,
philosophers, and scientists—a Bolívar who came to understand modernity
through the Hispanic world, and particularly, through Spanish-­language
sources. Reconstructing the colonial period, Belaúnde argues that at the
end of what was a centuries-long process, there emerged in the individual
regions of Latin America clear evidence of nationalist sentiment such that
if class interests were an important factor in the moment of independence,
they were not definitive. To the contrary, he insists, it was not simply
creoles who drove independence but “nations” in a stage of emergence.
That stage of emergence came out of Latin America’s own colonial
institutions, from the cabildo or town hall to the audiencia to the inten-
dancy to the viceroyalty, all of which contributed to creating the condi-
tions for the modern ideas that would grip the new republics. Belaúnde,
in a sense, was not that distant in his view of colonial institutions from
Rodríguez O., of whom we spoke in Chap. 1, but Belaúnde did not see
the Cortes as having any positive value for the formation of republican
government.49
This is not the first time that Belaúnde speaks in the name of the Latin
American republics, as we will see in Chap. 16, but at a time when the
ideological value of independence was being questioned in Peru, particu-
larly by the deceased though still eminently influential Mariátegui, and
when Pan Americanists were presenting Latin American independence as
representing a break from a backward Catholic culture, Belaúnde seeks to
get around the issue of class, social agency, and prejudice by locating Peru
in a continental or hemispheric intellectual tradition rooted in Spain,
Europe, and the United States. The Peru he imagines is rich with all the
elements it needed, integrated in such a way as to make the powerful Left
politics he opposed unnecessary and to stand firm against Pan American
interlopers.
The issue was the Left, but also then, US perceptions of Latin America.
Belaúnde presents the Bolívar of the Jamaica Letter and the Angostura
Address as the true figure committed to democratic government and to
rational reflection on political system. The later Bolívar who authored the
Bolivian Constitution, who refused to recognize the authority of local
elites, who stood against the notion of reform within the law, unable to
wait for the Constitutional Convention of 1831, is made to represent a
deviation from this, the essential figure. How does Belaúnde explain the
270  R. T. CONN

change between the two Bolívars? The latter figure, he says, has been cor-
rupted by his own success but most importantly by the flattery of the
generals and staff who surrounded him, many of whom were concerned
about the position they would occupy following his exit from power or his
death. He is like Napoleon in this respect, Belaúnde maintains.50 The so-­
called deviation was produced by good-old human frailty, something to
which anyone from any culture could fall prey. It is not because of the
Hispanic tradition.
But in presenting a lawful Bolívar who stands for what he defines as a
pragmatic, technical relationship to government, Belaúnde is placing Bolívar
in and against a colonial intellectual tradition defined, to be more precise, as
essentially reformist, one that by the late eighteenth century had reconciled
Enlightenment values with Catholicism, purportedly following in this way
the example of the Spanish, Latin America itself is not to be understood
against Spain or against Europe. The Spanish legacy is not to be seen accord-
ing to the thesis of the black legend (anti-Spanish and anti-Catholic propa-
ganda) promoted by Bolívar in the Jamaica Letter. Colonial societies had
advanced and gained a sense of themselves as nations within the context of
the Spanish traditions with which they dialogued and which they in fact
changed. The Latin American elites only gave up on Spain, he asserts, after
the imperial state failed to comply with long-established laws—particularly
those requiring that creoles be given the same opportunity as the Spaniards
for employment at the highest administrative levels—but also when the
Cortes was replaced by absolute monarchy.51 Eighteenth-century Europe as
represented by the encyclopedists in this way plays an important role in his
narrative. The thought of these actors had penetrated Spain, and through
thinkers such as writer, statesman, and law specialist Gaspar Melchor de
Jovellanos had found its way to Latin America.
Indeed, Belaúnde’s project is to construct a Spain that independent of
Fernando VII is European and modern, a Spain that cannot be reduced to
the particular political embodiment against which the Latin American
elites rebelled. More to the point, Bolívar, as the consummate antagonist
of Spain, is, Belaúnde wants us to think, then, not to be regarded as the
beginning of Latin America’s project of modernity. A process of political
development or maturity took root across the continent in the eighteenth
century in Lima, Charcas, Mexico City, Bogotá, and elsewhere, he sub-
mits. At this time, important fields of study were either invented or rein-
vigorated—the law and sociology being particularly important in this
regard. But if the elites of Latin America had for decades reflected upon
 10  A REBIRTH  271

their circumstances in dialogue with Europe and Spain, this fact had been
misrepresented by those who, stepping outside that tradition, quoted
directly from the already assimilated works of French or English figures
from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Standing out among them is Bolívar who, says Belaúnde, cites these
authors not because he did not already have access to them, filtered
through tradition, but to claim them as his own in an effort to legitimize
himself before the reading public. Moderation, patience, process, delib-
eration, legality—here are the values that Belaúnde is at pains to establish
as he constructs a Latin American scholarly and legal tradition that, as he
would have it, has been eclipsed from view by those who have gone directly
to the Enlightenment sources, the modernity those sources represent in
themselves standing in contrast to the tradition in which they found their
place. In the end, Belaúnde gives to the world a Bolívar who takes from
intellectual traditions already part of American society, and republics that
emerge from the viceroyalty political system.
Belaúnde is presenting Spain, Europe, and the United States not as
antagonists but as bearers of the distinct traditions with which Latin America
intellectuals have long dialogued in their quest to establish their own. At the
same time, he makes certain that no single individual stands out in his story.
Instead, a large cadre of figures are followed and celebrated. Outside influ-
ences are discussed in detail, yet it is not one model that takes hold but
many. And when these models do take hold at a more popular level, as in the
case of Rousseau, as he asserts, Latin American intellectuals are shown to be
prudent and dispassionate readers. At the same time, as part of Belaúnde’s
integrationist politics to tear down the binaries that would divide, in par-
ticular, Peruvian society, he draws upon the church, presenting it as a mod-
ernizing institution, responsible for the education of mestizos.
If Belaúnde uses the Pan American Bolívar to defend an imagined liberal
tradition for Peru, one without fissures of any kind, the US American
Daniel Joseph Clinton whose penname was Thomas Rourke avails himself
of Bolívar in an entirely different manner. Rourke produced two notable
books, both beautifully written. Gómez, Tyrant of the Andes, published in
1936, documents the violent, authoritarian regime of the country’s leader,
Juan Vicente Gómez, with whom the United States had been doing
business since roughly 1918, and from whom it had accepted, among other
things, as we know, the statue of Bolívar located in Central Park: Gómez’s
brutality; his legendary prisons; his exiles; his women and illegitimate chil-
dren; and his wealth. All of this is highlighted in a narrative that tells the
272  R. T. CONN

story of the courage of his enemies, many intellectuals, writers, and journal-
ists who dared to speak against him and who as a result suffered and died
horrible, brutal deaths in his three prisons. Interestingly, Rourke is careful
to preserve the Bolívar legacy on his own terms, showing how Gómez
claims and uses that legacy to his benefit, but makes sure not to identify
him with it. Instead, he presents Gómez as proof of the prophecy Bolívar
made at the end of his life, namely, that the destiny of Latin America was
that of a region to be ruled by little tyrants. And he takes that prophecy one
step further, describing this particular tyrant as a usurper of the Bolívar
legacy, which in Venezuela, as we know, had been fashioned into an impor-
tant symbolic element of the state by Guzmán Blanco in the 1870s.
How horrible was civilian life in Caracas? Rourke tells us that Gómez
was so brutal and cynical as to have guards at the infamous prison, the
Rotunda, open fire on protesters who had amassed there, having heard
rumors that on this day, the centenary of Bolívar’s passing, December 17,
1930, the young men detained since the 1928 protests would be released.52
Among the five people killed were mothers of the detained. Rourke was
bringing to the attention of the world a new meaning for the year of the
Simón Bolívar centenary that saw celebrations throughout the Americas.
In his 1939 biography, Man of Glory: Simón Bolívar, Rourke changes
direction, dialoguing with Venezuelan authorities on Bolívar, most
importantly constitutional historian Gil Fortoul (the one of 1930), to reas-
sert US prerogative with regard to Latin America. To do this, Rourke dis-
tances himself from the concept of a democratic, liberal Bolívar, the figure
promoted by Sherwell and more generally, the entire Pan American move-
ment in the United States. Instead, he presents Bolívar as a benevolent
charismatic leader who had the good fortune of being surrounded and
supported by British advisors and militia in a milieu that tended toward
authoritarianism by virtue of the Hispanic legacy. At a time of deep concern
about fascism and the specific influence of Germany in Latin American
republics, particularly Mexico, Chile, and Paraguay, Rourke presents the
British and their allies, the United States, as protectors of Latin America.
The investment in Latin America by other foreign powers and cultures in
the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, specifically the German, is
neatly erased from Rourke’s account.
Rourke, in fact, tells the story of independence from the perspective of
British and US involvement, giving the two states a role in the narratives
of independence and the Gran Colombia he constructs. As for the United
States, it did not send troops, ships, or money, but did recognize the new
 10  A REBIRTH  273

Latin American states. For example, on March 28, 1822, in the days
before Bolívar’s victory at Bomboná, which occurred on April 7, 1822,
the United States recognized the Gran Colombia, “the nation he had cre-
ated.”53 There is no connection between that act and the ongoing inde-
pendence process but it is as if there were, with the narrator telling us that
Bolívar did not know of the US decision at the time but that he would.
Rourke quickly turns his attention back to Bolívar and his troops as they
approach Bomboná but not before adding a sentence to inform the reader
that the decision by the United States had long been in the works, the
product of the advocacy of Senator Henry Clay, who “had labored con-
stantly in the interest of the struggling colonies of South America.”54
In addressing Páez in his narrative, Rourke similarly inserts into his
account of this major military leader and future president of the republic
details identifying him with the United States. He writes: “In the United
States he was entertained by the President, acclaimed by the public every-
where as only few foreign rulers have been acclaimed, and was honored
with a huge parade on Broadway. He died in New York in 1873 at
83 years.”55
It is as if Páez’s affection for the United States and the US affection for
him were being made to stand in for the US absence from the indepen-
dence process. But if the message was that Páez is one of us and we are
Páez, left out of that portrait is the fact that Páez was not always welcome
in the United States. As Judith Ewell tells us, during Páez’s second exile,
after having failed to defeat Liberals in the Federal War, he was received
almost as persona non grata, admonished by President Andrew Johnson
for having fought against the elected government of Monagas.56 For the
United States, Venezuela’s Federal War was nothing but a chain of events
brought about by a series of military uprisings against an elected
government. These were the uprisings in which Páez figured importantly,
establishing himself as dictator for one year.
Constructing British connections to the War of Independence was a far
easier task. Thousands of British men fought for Bolívar beginning in
1817, though without official support from the British government.
Without diminishing in any way the valor and heroism of Bolívar, Rourke
submits that independence was in part won with the support of the British
legionnaires, a statement that is not completely inaccurate but that interests
us on account of its discursive value. In the chapter Rourke dedicates to
the Irish and English who fought under Bolívar, he focuses on James
Rooke, an Irish military officer whom Bolívar made commander of the
274  R. T. CONN

Anglo-Venezuelan unit and whom Rourke praises for his protagonism in

Bolívar’s second crossing of the Andes into Boyacá in 1819. Rourke
describes his heroic death, calling him a patriot to liberty, but also has
Bolívar state both Venezuela’s and his own indebtedness to him.
Interestingly, Rourke refers to Bolívar as president of Venezuela rather
than as military general. He was both:

To Rooke I owe all my good fortune in New Granada, and Venezuela is

indebted to him for the preservation of its president and will hereafter have
to attribute her liberty mainly to him.57

Similarly, we are also told that Sucre could not have won the battle of
Pichincha on May 23, 1822, without the assistance of the British Albion
battalion.58
Rourke also takes pains to describe the tremendous hardship experi-
enced by those who journeyed from the United Kingdom to join Bolívar’s
forces. On the one hand, he details the go-betweens in London who prof-
ited from selling stashes of never-used British uniforms left over from the
Napoleonic War to jobless soldiers and who also profited from selling
commissions to them. On the other hand, he goes on to relate the horrible
fates that the legionnaires together with their families suffered. We are told
that many died en route with their loved ones or after being abandoned by
their ships’ captains on Caribbean islands. And we are also informed that
the reduced number who did make it to Angostura discovered that Bolívar
had no money to pay them for their services and as a result, in some cases,
found themselves having to barter their uniforms to indigenous patriot
soldiers in order to survive.
Finally, in the introduction, Rourke speaks of having traveled to Caracas
shortly after the transition from the strongman Gómez to the liberal and
former Gómez general, López Contreras, only to witness the municipal
government’s killing of protesters, and as he perceived it, the acceptance
of this violence by the people, whether aristocrat or “peon,” a view of the
moment quite different from the one provided by the Venezuelan Picón
Salas that we have already seen. If in his previous work, Gómez is the
source of the violence in the polis—the embodiment of a particular politi-
cal form, the tyrant—in this work the cause is purported to be culture, as
shown by the acceptance by the Venezuelan people of the continued kill-
ings. The issue was not changing the political system, then, but under-
standing that here was a culture that was essentially violent.
 10  A REBIRTH  275

How Rourke could have come to this view is interesting to speculate

on. The source could have well been contemporary commentary in the
United States on the Spanish Civil War with generalizations about Hispanic
culture writ large, or the source could have been Venezuelan historian
Vallenilla Lanz’s book, Cesarismo democrático, which speaks of a violent
Venezuela. Whatever the origin, Rourke establishes a new variation on
discourses about Spanish-American and Anglo-American difference. Latin
America is different from the United States by virtue of its ungovernability,
whereas the leader Bolívar is entirely like leaders of the United States and
other non-Hispanic countries. But if Bolívar stands in this way above the
people who surround him, he is also sufficiently of their culture, Rourke
asserts, to dominate it according to its own terms. The operative concept
for Rourke is hombría, or Hispanic manliness, a set of qualities that Bolívar
possessed, permitting him to hold in place the so-­called rival Liberators
who could not help but respect the Liberator:

Thus it was to be during all the remaining years of the Liberator’s struggle
in the interests of the task he had put himself to. Only in his presence, under
his own inspiring and dominating leadership, was there unity of purpose and
harmony in action. Immediately his back was turned, the dissensions spread
and all that had been achieved fell away into dust. No one knew that fact
better than he. No one saw better the disruptive tendencies in his comrades
and the fatal weakness of his people—the dependence upon and the psychic
need for a dominant, forceful personality to hold them together. That need
is deep in the character of the Spaniard and is augmented in the Spanish
American by a sense of weakness. The torero must dominate the bull, man
must dominate woman, the leader must dominate his men. Bolívar recog-
nized that trait in his people consistently in his political doctrines, and
sought to satisfy it in the strongly centralized form of government, which he
always advocated.59

The problem, as Rourke states it, was that Bolívar could exercise this
authority only when he was physically present. There is some truth to this
notion, which underlies Gil Fortoul’s revised 1930 Historia Constitucional
de Venezuela, but one would have to attend to individual moments to account
for what was at stake, particularly in the political period of 1825–1830. What
for Rourke was nothing but disruption and disorder was from another per-
spective, in fact that of Gil Fortoul, local elites organizing to protect their
regional and national interests.
276  R. T. CONN

Bolívar was being stretched in different directions as interpreters sought

to make him speak for a United States embattled ideologically with dictator-
ship in Europe. On October 6, 1941, two months before the attack on Pearl
Harbor, the US radio show, Radio Cavalcade, ran a program entitled Bolívar,
the Liberator with Paul Muni in the starring role just as he had played Benito
Juárez in the 1939 Warner Bros. film. The fragmented story of Bolívar jumps
from one period in his life to the next, and paints him as a republican figure
with a dictatorial streak. Rourke’s hero, Rooke, is a central character with the
major moment being the 1819 crossing of the Andes. Bolívar is presented as
speaking the words of Churchill and FDR. The radio show ends with his
exile, which is presented not as one imposed upon him but one that he willed
for himself in order to repent for his dictatorship of 1828–1830.60 Bolívar is
still a usable icon, a figure of the Americas presenting lessons on liberalism
and its opposites to a US public that has been watching London being
bombed and that is about to plunge into another world war.

Notes
1. “Ready to Fight for Monroe Doctrine, Plans to Invite World Disarmament,
Says Harding at Bolívar Unveiling,” New York Times, April 20. 1921, 1.
2. Idem.
3. Thomas F.  O’Brien, The Revolutionary Mission: American Enterprise in
Latin America, 1900–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1993), 70–79.
4. Dudley Phelps, Migration of Industry to South America (New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1936).
5. Guillermo A.  Sherwell, Simón Bolívar (The Liberator) Patriot, Warrior,
Statesman, Father of Five Nations; a Sketch of his Life and his Work
(Washington, DC: Press of B.S. Adams, 1921).
6. Lawrence A. Wilkins, “Obituary: Guillermo A. Sherwell,” Hispania, 1926,
9, 5: 306–308, JSTOR, 1 June 2014, http://www.jstor.org/search.
7. Guillermo A.  Sherwell, “The Customer and the Market,” (Vol XIII,
August, 1921, No. 2), 125–134. “We have had great success in recent
years, and we think it was due to ourselves, forgetting that it was due
mainly to the very abnormal conditions through which the world has been
passing. …Europe is coming back in full strength to our South American
markets, and is elbowing us out,” 126.
8. Guillermo A.  Sherwell, Simón Bolívar (The Liberator) Patriot, Warrior,
Statesman, Father of Five Nations; a Sketch of his Life and his Work
(Washington, DC: Press of B.S. Adams, 1921), 145.
9. Ibid., 156–159.
 10  A REBIRTH  277

10. Ibid., 177.

11. Ibid., 196.
12. Ibid., 226.
13. Ibid., 172.
14. Harold F. Peterson, Argentina and the United States, 1810–1960 (Albany:
State University of New York, 1964).
15. Manuel Ugarte, El porvenir de la América Latina (Valencia, España:
F. Sempere y Compañía, 1911), 192.
“And let us remember in each moment that the men who brought about
independence tended always to union, like Bolívar and San Martín. The
crumbling apart came afterwards, the result of our passions and ideological
camps.”
“Y recordemos a cada instante que los hombres que hicieron la
Independencia tendieron siempre a la unión, como Bolívar y San Martín.
El desmigajamiento vino después, con las pasiones y los bandos.”
16. John Carter, “This Road Building Era,” The North American Review,
1929, Vol. 228, No. 5. 594–598.
17. César Aira, Varamo (Barcelona: Editorial Anagrama, 2002).
18. Edward E. Curtis, “The Bolívar Centennial,” The Nation, 1926, Volume
123, Issue 3190, 182–183.
19. Carlos E.  Castañeda, “The First Pan-American Congress,” The North
American Review, 1926, Vol. 223, No. 831 (Jun.–Aug.), 248–255.
20. Guillermo A.  Sherwell, Simón Bolívar (The Liberator) Patriot, Warrior,
Statesman, Father of Five Nations; a Sketch of his Life and his Work
(Baltimore, MD: The Sun Book and Job Printing Office, 1930).
21. “Bolívar Honored Here by Pan-Americans,” New York Times, December
11, 1930.
22. Carter Horsley, “The Bolivar, 230 Central Park West.” Accessed 23 July,
2019. https://www.cityrealty.com/nyc/central-park-west/the-bolivar-
230-central-park-west/review/894.
23. “Tribute To Bolivar Will Be Paid Today,” New York Times, 17 December,
1930, 25.
24. Guillermo A.  Sherwell, Simón Bolívar (el libertador) Patriot, Warrior,
Statesman, Father of Five Nations; a Skectch of his Life and his Work (Clinton,
MA: The Colonial Press, 1951).
25. “Statue of Bolivar Rededicated Here,” New York Times, 20 April 1951, 31.
26. Henri LaFayette Villaume Ducaudray Holstein, Memoirs of Simón Bolívar,
President Liberator of the Republic of Colombia, and of his principal gener-
als; secret history of the Revolution and the events which preceded it, from
1807 to the present time. With an introduction containing an account of the
statistics and the present situation of said republic, education, character,
manners and customs of the inhabitants (Boston: S.G. Goodrich, 1829).
278  R. T. CONN

27. T. R. (Thomas Russell) Ibarra, Bolívar, The Passionate Warrior (New York:
Washburn, 1929).
28. Hildegarde Angell, Simón Bolívar, South American Liberator (New York:
Norton, 1930).
29. Speech of Hon. Hiram Bingham of Connecticut in the U.S. Senate,
Thursday, April 10 and Friday, April 11, 1930.
30. Percy Alvin Martin, Simón Bolívar: The Liberator (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1931), 31.
31. Percy Alvin Martin, Simón Bolívar, The Liberator (London, H.  Milford,
Oxford University Press, 1931).
32. Phyllis Marschall and John Crane, The Dauntless Liberator: Simón Bolívar
(New York: Century Co., 1933).
33. Víctor Andrés Belaúnde, Bolívar and the Political Thought of the Spanish
American Revolution (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1938).
34. Thomas Rourke, Man of Glory: Símon Bolívar (New York: Morrow and
Co., 1939).
35. Gerhard Masur, Simón Bolívar (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico
Press, 1948).
36. Waldo Frank, Birth of a World, Bolívar in Terms of His Peoples (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1951).
37. Michel Vaucaire, Bolivar, el Libertador (Paris: B. Grasset, 1928).
38. Michel Vaucaire, Bolívar, the Liberator, trans. Margaret Reed (Boston and
New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1929), 153–154.
39. T. R. Ybarra, Bolívar: The Passionate Warrior (New York: Ives Washburn
Publisher, 1929), 38.
40. Ibid., 359–360.
41. Phyllis Marschall and John Crane, The Dauntless Liberator: Simón Bolívar
(New York: Century Co., 1933), 105.
42. Ibid., 124.
43. “Hoover Eulogizes Bolivar at Service,” New  York Times, 18 December
1930, p. 21. The article also quotes Secretary Stimson, chairman of the
governing board, lauding Bolívar as, “one of the few figures in history
whose stature and influence grow with each succeeding year.”
44. Víctor Andrés Belaúnde, Bolívar and the Political Thought of the Spanish
American Revolution (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1938).
45. This lecture was published in Bolivar and the Political Thought of the
Spanish American Revolution (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1938).
46. Hilah Paulmier and Robert Haven Schauffler, Eds., Pan-American day; an
anthology of the best prose and verse on Pan Americanism and the good neigh-
bor policy. Plays, poems, essay material, speeches, exercises, and sayings for Pan-
American day and for year-round study in the schools (New York: Dodd,
Mead & Company, 1943).
 10  A REBIRTH  279

47. “Reviewed Work: Pan American Day by Hilah Paulmier, Robert Haven
Schauffler,” Dorothy Conzelman, Hispania 26, no. 4 (1943): 508.
48. Barack Obama, Pan American Day and Pan American Week, 2015. By
the President of the United States of America. A Proclamation. Website
accessed November 2015. https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-
press-office/2015/04/10/presidential-proclamation-pan-american-day-
and-pan-american-week-2015.
49. Víctor Andrés Belaúnde, Bolívar and the Political Thought of the Spanish
American Revolution (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1938).
50. Ibid., 233–234.
51. Ibid., 168. “The absolutist trend of the monarchical reaction made the
Creoles see the lack of foundation of the reformist dream. The absolutism
established in Spain spreads to South America, with all its characteristics of
violence and blood. Spain will continue the war supported by the Holy
Alliance, favored by the neutrality of the United States and to a certain
extent, of England.”
52. Thomas Rourke, Gómez: Tyrant of the Andes (Garden City, NY: Halcyon
House, 1936), 256–257.
53. Ibid., Man of Glory: Simón Bolívar (New York: William Morrow and Co.,
1939), 259.
54. Ibid., 259.
55. Ibid., 169–170.
56. Judith Ewell, Venezuela and the United States: From Monroe’s Hemisphere
to Petroleum’s Empire (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996).
57. Thomas Rourke, Man of Glory, 222.
58. Ibid., 263.
59. Ibid., 155–156.
60. Du Pont presents Cavalcade of America. Paul Muni as Bolivar, the
Liberator, October 6, 1941, Original Play by Dudley Nichols, Adapted
for Radio by Robert Tallman (Unknown: E.I. du Pont de Nemours &
Company, Inc., 1941).
 CHAPTER 11

Bolívar in the Wake of World War II:

Gerhard Masur and Waldo Frank

The immediate post-war period saw several major works produced on the
subject of Bolívar: Gerhard Masur’s 1948 Simón Bolívar; Waldo Frank’s
1951 Birth of a World: Bolívar in Terms of His Peoples; and Salvador de
Madariaga’s 1951 Bolívar. We spoke of Madariaga’s hefty volume in
Chap. 7, underlining how it tears into Bolivarian writing in the Americas,
in particular into the Venezuelan Bolivarian machine. All three biographies
achieved wide readerships. In this chapter, we address the volumes of
Masur and Frank.
Both authors engaged with the US Pan Americanist agenda, namely
modernization through inculcation of so-called US democratic values.
But they differed as to the ways they understood the applicability and rel-
evance of those values. Masur, who had already written on the German
historian Leopold von Ranke, the father of modern historical writing, used
this new moment in his life—an émigré in the United States—to put
Ranke’s method into action.
Ranke, in his lectures and the prefaces to the histories he wrote, including
the famous one he penned for his History of the Popes, explains that to write
history he has taken advantage of materials found in state and private
collections that had previously been ignored—the insights they could
provide not appreciated—including government documents, memoirs,
diaries, personal and formal missives, and diplomatic dispatches.1 He also
explains that he has evaluated those sources and used them to produce a
narrative that both recreates the historical period and goes beyond that

© The Author(s) 2020 281

R. T. Conn, Bolívar’s Afterlife in the Americas,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26218-1_11
282  R. T. CONN

period. Ranke was speaking about the scope and nature of one’s subject of
inquiry, which should be seen not only as part of a process occurring over
the centuries, as German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
argues it should, but also as the product of the historical moment. Less
philosophy and reason, and more art, Ranke famously stated as he instructed
his students to search out archives and allow those archives to tell of their
moment, though through the accomplished voice of the historian as
narrator.2
Declaring that the biographies of Bolívar were no longer adequate and
seeing only “sources” scattered about the Americas waiting for a person
such as himself to examine, evaluate, and incorporate, Masur threw him-
self into writing. His goal was not only to bring Bolívar’s figure forth in
the context of Bolívar’s milieu by going directly to the archives,3 but also
to do so in the light of major figures of world history, who included
Napoleon as well as one who came after Bolívar. That person was Winston
Churchill. In Masur’s view of history as restoration, Churchill represents
the higher plane which Bolívar had not been able to reach. As the intel-
lectual historian Hayden White explains with regard to Ranke’s vision of
history in the nineteenth century: liberal forces that are powerful in an
early moment such as in that of revolution (read: the French and 1848
revolutions) but are then sidelined by forces of reaction, re-emerge at a
later point in time to assume their proper form in a changed world, one
that has produced a new international order.4 Bolívar comes forth in that
new order as a modern leader who laid the groundwork for Pan American
unification. It is a matter of stating where he went wrong so that his vision
can be resurrected.
Waldo Frank, who was inspired by Masur, also produced a biography of
epic dimension, one in which he similarly conceives of Bolívar as both the
product of a cultural reality and as an agent of world history. Frank fash-
ions his Bolívar epic in accordance with the hermeneutic through which
he produced his previous tomes on Latin America—one that celebrates
the Hispanic world. Different though they were, Masur and Frank both
stuck close to the Venezuelan-centered narrative established by earlier
interpreters in the US Pan American tradition. In accordance with Ranke’s
dictum, the two works were artful.
Masur’s book was funded with a Rockefeller Foundation grant, trans-
lated from German into English, and brought out through the University
of New Mexico Press. In the preface, Masur tells of having been received at
the Colombian embassy in Geneva in the moment of his flight from
Germany in 1935 and of having seen on the wall of the embassy a portrait
 11  BOLÍVAR IN THE WAKE OF WORLD WAR II: GERHARD MASUR…  283

of Bolívar. It was in this moment, he states, that he made the decision that
he would write Bolívar’s biography, beginning that labor in 1941 with the
assistance of a grant from Columbia University for foreign scholars.
To construct his Rankian-inspired narrative, he drew on an array of
materials, ranging from Lecuna’s military histories of the 1920s to US Pan
Americanist narratives to the Ecclesiastical and Civil History of New
Granada by José Manuel Groot published in Bogotá in 18895 to words of
a “hitherto unpublished document that well deserves to be called his
political will” that dated from 1829, printed in a Venezuelan newspaper in
1851 and located by him in Vicente Lecuna’s Bolívar Archive.6
The Bolivarian traditions of Latin America that we are examining in this
book were not of interest to Masur, who sees not established traditions
but untapped sources. Those purportedly untapped sources lie in what is
taken to be a chaotic intellectual world that has produced unreliable
interpretations of Bolívar—a Bolívar who in the later years of his life was
misunderstood and hated but who after his death became an object of
adulation—one extreme replaced by another. With regard to that adulation
that Masur describes as having been dominant since the return of his
remains to Venezuela in 1842, he describes it as characteristic of young
nations untrained in seeing their own histories critically and correctly.7
Masur is discarding writing about Bolívar in Latin America and particu-
larly in Venezuela to make claims for the superiority of his biography. The
North-South binary is what provides him with that sense of authority. In
fact, he ascribes his ability to see Bolívar objectively as opposed to how he
is seen in Latin America to the subject position he enjoys as one who lives
in the United States. To the US American public, he will make Bolívar
known, the first, he alleges at the end of his narration, to do so.8 He will
explain in particular Bolívar’s final years, still not adequately compre-
hended by Latin American historiography.
It is a matter of new beginnings, of placing his figure in the context of
Western culture. Presenting Bolívar in the first lines of his work as resem-
bling Odysseus, he characterizes him as a romantic epic hero using a uni-
versal critical language defined by the binaries of selfishness and generosity,
private and public, politics and military power. Bolívar is of his historical
moment, but also ahead of it, one who stands for revolution but who at
the same time is held back by his own imperfections, rejected for good
reason by the new national constituencies and republics. Bolívar is all too
human. His principal imperfection is his inability to understand both the
historical reality of the distinct regions of Latin America and what Masur
calls nationalism. Masur explains the genesis of nationalism. It is the result
284  R. T. CONN

of the dissolution of the Spanish imperial system and the reaction to that
system. But there is more. Masur asserts, just as Madariaga would three
years later, that Latin America was not ready to be independent when
Napoleon made independence possible.
What greater source of tension for his drama of Western culture than
this! Bolívar boldly and intelligently seeks to impose a structure on a real-
ity that is averse to unions of the kind he promotes, but that at the same
time does not have the institutions necessary to produce societies with
good government. Noble but flawed, he is adamant about building a
super-state, a term Masur invents and deploys along with Bolívar’s Andean
Federation. Masur is using his discovered source—purported words of
Bolívar from 1829 printed in a newspaper in 1851 and located by him in
Lecuna’s Archivo del Libertador that reveal Bolívar’s political desire to
bring north and south together. Here is the real Bolívar, the hemispheric
one. Through his massive state and what Masur calls his educational dic-
tatorship, he aimed to uplift a purportedly immature people. But Masur
tells us that his undertaking did not make sense given the geographical
expanse of the region he wanted to preside over. Even so, he should be
respected because Bolívar thought in a manner that was ethically and
rationally based. Furthermore, he also faced an intractable problem that
no one during his time could solve.
Masur compares his epic hero to Napoleon throughout the work.
Bolívar admired him in certain aspects, and was similar to him, we are told.
In the end, though, Bolívar resigned, stepping down from power and
establishing himself definitively as different from Napoleon. For Masur,
who is playing on the idea of George Washington refusing to be king, the
question is what constitutes good leadership? What is the difference
between that which is labeled a political conception and that which is
called an action defined only by military force?

His resignation and the disintegration of Greater Colombia coincide and

condition each other. Bolívar’s rule was never aimed at the satisfaction of
selfish desire, nor did it pander to a hollow lust for power. He had hoped to
carry out a political conception; and when he saw that he had failed, he sur-
rendered—with hesitation and reluctantly it is true, but without resorting to
the force which was at his disposal. This is the great difference between
Bolívar and Napoleon and between Bolívar and all the great dictators of the
twentieth century.9
 11  BOLÍVAR IN THE WAKE OF WORLD WAR II: GERHARD MASUR…  285

In the age of totalitarianism, dictatorship is the issue. Masur is locating

Bolívar squarely on the axis that is republicanism and dictatorship, finessing
his 1828–1830 dictatorship and then the fact that he does not leave power
in one clean and definitive move. But, in the context of Pan Americanism
in which he is writing, he wants Bolívar to be a usable figure, one whose
attempt at creating a state to uplift and unite the peoples of Latin America
can serve to authorize the unification that will come later. Bolívar is both
a subject and a vehicle. In the Cavalcade of America’s radio drama, Bolívar,
the Liberator of October 6, 1941, Paul Muni as Bolívar exiles himself to
repent for his dictatorship. Here Bolívar resigns, allowing for a new
government to be formed.10
There is much in the context of world history for which Napoleon
should be praised, we are told throughout the narrative. Masur submits
that his continental vision was superior to the monarchies of Europe,
monarchies that the US public would have looked down upon and that
Napoleon either chased from Europe or subordinated to his will and his
1804 codes. Without speaking of the period of the restoration, that is, of
Napoleon’s defeat and the new Europe that comes into being, Masur
writes that Napoleon put an end to the monarchic system, opening a path
to modernity. He even has words of praise for his continental system above
and beyond his vision of its role in leveling the old order. He describes it
as efficient and rational, telling us that Bolívar’s vision of a large state was
comparable to that of Napoleon. When it comes to military matters,
throughout his narrative that presents Bolívar as a revolutionary who is up
against his enemies—monarchists or royalists when they are identified—
Bolívar is described as having a military genius similar to Napoleon’s, his
genius the reason he prevailed over those who opposed him.
There is more that Masur does with his figure as he calls on Napoleon
as a friendly counterpoint to draw Bolívar’s character. To understand the
Venezuelan leader is to see a great warrior who like Napoleon has no for-
mal training, who writes not poetry but letters of literary merit, who like
Napoleon believes in the continent (Napoleon, the European; Bolívar, the
South American) as the proper space in which to understand moderniza-
tion, who seizes dictatorial power for the good of the people, and who
cares about the masses and the impoverished.
It is also to understand differences. Napoleon presided over troops
numbering in the hundreds of thousands; Bolívar presided over only a
slim fraction of that. Napoleon drew up his battle plans using maps, Bolívar
did not, there being no maps in existence, and thus having no choice but
286  R. T. CONN

to base his decisions on his personal knowledge of Latin America’s

­geography. Napoleon trailed his troops into battle, surrounded by advisors;
Bolívar was in the vanguard, unprotected.
Masur is taking advantage of Napoleon in a new way in the European
and the US American traditions, his figure available differently in the
immediate wake of World War II. Napoleon had been an important point
of comparison for biographers but he was usually praised only as a great
military leader, his legacy as a statesman when he ruled France and much
of Europe not addressed for the reason that three million to six million
died in his wars, “his threat to representative government assumed.”11
Bolívar is not Napoleon but Napoleon is not Hitler, Mussolini or Franco.
Masur’s biography, the endnotes telling of a figure thoroughly
researched, is also driven by another comparison, that of Bolívar to
Francisco de Miranda. This is clear to view in the episode he constructs
around the matter of how Bolívar’s actions in Puerto Cabello in 1812
should be regarded. He assumes as his own the binary established by
Robertson, then handed down to Marshall and Crane, and finally, to
Rourke. He tells us that Bolívar had, indeed, made a mistake in not having
taken proper precautions to protect the Puerto Cabello fort against the
possibility of being seized through bribery or another means by the impor-
tant Spanish military prisoners it held. He goes on to speak of how Bolívar
learned from that experience for his future decisions while he castigates
Miranda who, he says, should have gone with his troops to attempt to
retake the site even if that meant risking his life, something that a real
leader would have done.12 Throughout his narrative, Masur contrasts
Bolívar with Miranda, describing Bolívar as the epic hero who risks his
own person while never giving up hope. Miranda is the opposite, carefully
considering the possibilities for military success, and as in the case of the
loss of the fort, unwilling to put his life on the line when his reason has
him lose faith. Heroes do not act only in accordance with what is sensible
and rational. On the subject of the negotiated armistice, he states that
Miranda’s haste in leaving for Europe was proof that the leader did not
trust the Spanish to honor the settlement, namely to apply the laws of the
new constitution of Cádiz to the region and not imprison or execute the
First Republic’s leaders.13 In comparison, Bolívar is the brave and true hero.
Masur’s interest in Europe was hardly limited to Napoleon. European
references, particularly German and French, run through Masur’s narra-
tive, used to heighten Bolívar’s importance for a United States whose edu-
cated classes are well versed in the European canon and to bring him forth
 11  BOLÍVAR IN THE WAKE OF WORLD WAR II: GERHARD MASUR…  287

in the light of World War II. Masur distinguishes between what is French

and German, on the one hand, and what is British, on the other.
Masur is centering Bolívar in a new world history. Monarchy, which
Napoleon sought to bring to an end, represents the past, liberalism the
future. With this as his narrative fulcrum, he asks whether Bolívar was, in
fact, a monarchist, bringing attention to the accusations of Bolívar’s detrac-
tors from the late 1820s, namely that Bolívar wanted Latin America to be
part of the British Empire. As if he were resolving the matter once and for
all and as if the question itself were the one that was prominent for the dif-
ferent national traditions of the Americas where Bolívar was an important
axis for intellectual and political debate, Masur delivers in dramatic fashion
his verdict. Simply put, Bolívar was not a monarchist. But far from present-
ing Bolívar as a good US liberal, Masur characterizes him as a figure influ-
enced by European culture, particularly as represented by eighteenth-century
France. Rousseau is key, made to stand in the context of the French
Revolution. Masur, who would go on to write a book on totalitarianism,
brings the Genevan thinker forth in the post-war terms that would define
the debate about his figure for many, as we saw earlier in our discussion of
the US political scientist Judith Schlar, the Venezuelan philosopher Luis
Castro Leiva, and David Lay Williams, author of Rousseau’s Social Contract:
An Introduction. In what is a vision of active transformation, Masur writes
about Bolívar: “Having once adopted the ideologies of the French
Revolution, Bolívar completed his break with the absolute traditions of
Spain. At that point he was a Jacobin in word and thought.”14
The new, de-Hispanized Bolívar, Masur continues, was a materialist,
a skeptic, and a centralist who believed in top-down notions of social
change through legislation and culture. As a Jacobin (the radicals behind
the Reign of Terror), inspired, we are to think, by Rousseau, Bolívar
never veered from his belief that the model of Latin American states
should be a centralized one.15 Even in his Jamaica Letter, where he con-
siders and disavows the idea of a massive state, Bolívar, Masur tells us,
displays a fascination with a large state organization. But most impor-
tantly, for Masur, if Bolívar is like no other figure before him in Latin
America, this is because he had no traditions upon which to draw and
was obligated then to create his state out of whole cloth. We see Bolívar
as a cosmopolitan figure incongruously developing his political vision in
tiny remote towns that are tropical. One such town, he wants us to see,
was the famous Angostura. Bolívar, writing from the blank slate that is
the tropics, is Cartesian, with Latin America nothing but a chaotic world
288  R. T. CONN

which would require many decades to move forward and reach matura-
tion, a world which, therefore, was all too vulnerable to the fancies of the
intellectual demiurge.
But there is another cultural force acting on Bolívar. This is the Anglo-­
Saxon. We are told that Bolívar allows the “parliament” to reassemble in
Angostura in 1819. What Masur is calling the parliament is the group of
legislators from Venezuela’s First Republic. There are also the 7000 Irish
and English soldiers and officers who go to serve under Bolívar and to
whom Masur dedicates a chapter. For a US American public that is familiar
with the British parliament and its storied war-time leader Winston
Churchill, the use of the term to construct an autochthonous legislative
tradition that runs parallel to Bolívar’s military acts and of which he is also
a part is effective. Parliament and the military must always work together
with the former ensuring the protection of republican government.
Furthermore, Masur tells of Bolívar’s Angostura Address with its proposal
for a constitution for the Gran Colombia modeled on the British though
without a king. There is no mention of Venezuela’s 1811 constitution.
Masur’s analysis of the 1815 Jamaica Letter is fascinating in regard to
the new, French-intellectual being the author assigns Bolívar. The
Rousseauian allusions from the Social Contract are strong, and the matter
of social inequality paramount. Masur presents Bolívar in this moment as
an exile who has gone from aristocrat to beggar, shedding the social being
into which he was born. If we now see Bolívar—who does find himself
without money at the end of his life—as the ideal student of Rousseau,
circumstance allowing him to understand the concept of equality, what is
emphasized here, as throughout Masur’s narration, is Bolívar’s spirit and
identification with French culture. Bolívar is writing his Jamaica Letter as
if he were writing Rousseau’s Social Contract, it would seem, a figure who
was not only a man of the sword, but also a man of letters—the latter in a
way now conceivable to a US American public as they see him symbolically
reproduce a text they are familiar with through the European canon. For
Masur, the Rousseauian Bolívar stands for liberty and equality, the same
values that Britain and the United States represent. From the heights of
his ethical vision, Bolívar seeks to bring a people into modernity.
Masur, as we are seeing, raises up the French cultural and intellectual
tradition while denigrating the Spanish, which he sees as no more than a
reflection of imperial Spain. It is a tradition from which Bolívar liberates
himself. Here was a view of the transatlantic Hispanic cultural world that
was in direct opposition to that of Víctor Andrés Belaúnde, whose work
 11  BOLÍVAR IN THE WAKE OF WORLD WAR II: GERHARD MASUR…  289

we discussed in Chap. 10.16 Masur also addresses aspects of the new

political culture that emerged in Latin America. Latin American inde-
pendence, he writes, gave rise to the caudillo. Bolívar, who starts off as
a caudillo, separates himself from that figure by becoming a universal
leader. He accomplishes this by shedding one national intellectual skin
to adopt another, the same logic of active transformation serving as an
explanation. That is, to state the specifics of that transformation again,
he trades the intellectual tradition of imperial Spain for the French,
imperfect though the French tradition is, tending toward totalitarian-
ism as now understood in the immediate post-war. But the French tra-
dition exists in him along with the Anglo-Saxon, Masur submits: “He
sought a constitution for America which would give form to its mani-
fold and diverse elements. An Anglo-Saxon realism within him com-
bined with the French radicalism of Rousseau.”17 What we can conclude
is that Bolívar would have been a tyrannical agent of equality had it not
been for the tempering effect of Anglo-Saxon values.
Bolívar anchored his vision in cultural and political concepts whose philo-
sophical orientation was top down, if not, in some cases, Masur emphasizes
throughout his tome, proto-fascist, the adjective he uses to describe the
Gran Colombia and the Andean Federation at the end of his text. But in the
twentieth century the peoples of Latin America and of the world have
changed. On the one hand, Latin America has developed. On the other, the
United States has emerged definitively as a world power, and with its com-
mitment to democratic ideals and to Latin America, can be counted upon to
bring about the change in the hemisphere Bolívar could not.
The world, too, in a sense, has caught up with Bolívar, as evidenced by
the League of Nations, doomed though it was by US unwillingness to
become a signatory nation, but which represents for Masur the most
actual ideal of a world organization at a time when the United Nations is
only in its infancy, the expression of Bolívar’s 1826 Panama Congress. For
Masur, humanity is only as good as the ideological models that prevail in
the moment. Bolívar, who was also flawed, as all heroes are, did his best
with what was available to him. He was fortunate to have come into con-
tact with the Anglo-Saxon world. It was, Masur is saying, the salvation not
only of a world that had been under siege from fascism, but also of Bolívar
who, had he not resigned in the moment he did, allowing himself to be
guided by Anglo-Saxon parliamentarianism and pragmatism, would have
gone down in history as another Napoleon. Bolívar teetered on the repub-
lican/dictatorial axis, just as humanity did in the 1930s and 1940s.
290  R. T. CONN

Let us now turn to Waldo Frank. If Masur provides US readers with a

non-Hispanic European Bolívar who participates in the Anglo-Saxon world,
the US intellectual, Waldo Frank, with his 1951 biography, Birth of a World:
Bolívar in Terms of His Peoples, sought, among other things, to contest that
vision. Frank, though, was a lot like Masur and previous writers from the
1920s forward in the United States, following as he did the Venezuelan ver-
sion of Bolívar’s life and career. Indeed, as we have seen, Pan Americanism in
the 1930s and 1940s had become linked with the iconic figure of Bolívar.
But just as Masur did not acknowledge previous renderings of Bolívar, or
recognize the intellectual traditions of the Americas in which his figure played
a vital role, neither did Frank. Frank had always presented himself as enjoying
a privileged relationship to Latin America through his alleged mastery of its
archives and his purported understanding of its peoples. Not surprisingly
then, Frank says nothing of his Pan American predecessors, mentioning nei-
ther Thomas Rourke, nor Percy Alvin Martin, nor the Mexican Guillermo
Sherwell, nor the Peruvian Víctor Andrés Belaúnde. Instead, he presents
himself as following directly in the footsteps of Vicente Lecuna, who we
focused on in Chap. 7, Venezuela’s renowned twentieth-century archivist
and historian who prided himself on producing a truthful historical record of
the actions of the leaders of independence.
But Lecuna is not the only important Venezuelan figure for Frank. The
other is Rómulo Betancourt, one of the leaders of Acción Democrática
(AD) which came to power in a 1945 coup and which in 1948 held presi-
dential elections, Venezuela’s first. The biography, Frank explains to his
readers, was written at the request of Betancourt, who had already asked
Lecuna to prepare a deluxe edition of Bolívar’s writings, as we saw earlier,
and who now wanted, on the occasion of the inauguration of the writer-­
turned-­politician Rómulo Gallegos, the event Frank had come to Caracas
to attend, a new English-language biography of Bolívar to carry word
north and eventually south—assuming it would be translated, as all Frank’s
previous works had been—of the new democratic Venezuela. Frank’s
Birth of a World was to be a tribute, then, to Betancourt, the AD, the
writer-turned-politician Gallegos, and to Pan Americanism, to which the
AD had dedicated several cultural events at the inauguration. But by the
time Birth of a World was finished and came out in the United States,
indeed, by the time Frank had even had a chance to begin the project,
there had been a radical change in Venezuela. Only ten months after the
February 1948 inauguration of Gallegos, the same military leaders who
had established an alliance with Betancourt and the AD, wanting civilian
 11  BOLÍVAR IN THE WAKE OF WORLD WAR II: GERHARD MASUR…  291

government, staged a coup that sent both Gallegos and Betancourt into
exile. As we learn in Frank’s forward, the fact of the coup, however, did
not diminish his resolve to write a book on Bolívar. For if his original hope
had been to support Venezuela’s turn to democracy as represented by the
election of Gallegos—an election that signified for him at the time noth-
ing less than the enfranchisement of the Venezuelan people—his new
hope was to help illuminate Gallegos’s overthrow.
This illumination is the subject we will take up. Frank, interestingly,
does not argue for democracy or the AD. To the contrary, the argument
he makes is that Latin American nations need strong, benevolent leaders
like the humanistic military and dictatorial Bolívar he imagines. Still, Frank
never targets Gallegos and the AD directly, even though the vision of lead-
ership he outlines in Birth of a World was intended as a corrective to the
ideal of a Latin American nation run by political parties.
Fernando Coronil explains in The Magical State that the AD helped
create the conditions for the coup by failing to present democratization as
the triumph of the people and not simply of the party. A sign of this, com-
ments Coronil, is the fact that the coup occurred amid absolute calm, as
no sector of society protested.18 Frank’s analysis is quite different. For he
would seem to celebrate Venezuela precisely for not protesting, for not
descending into violence, if you like, as Bogotá had in reaction that same
year to the assassination of the populist leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán.
Indeed, it is the experience of the famous citywide day of violence known
as the bogotazo, commented on at length at the end of his 400-page tome
that is at the heart of his reflection. On the basis of the two experiences of
1948, the riot in Bogotá and the coup in Venezuela, Frank will propose to
his readers two governmental models: dictatorship and stability as repre-
sented by the Venezuelan tradition; party politics and instability as repre-
sented by the Colombian.19
Whatever conclusions we may draw in regard to the connection between
the overthrow of Gallegos and the AD, and Frank’s construction of a
Bolívar identified with humanistic or ethical dictatorial leadership (a new
version of the enlightened despot), it is important to understand that
Frank’s approach to the Americas at this point in his career is different
from his approach prior to World War II.  During the 1930s Frank had
been a socialist who saw in the aesthetic the hope of a moral world that
would rise above the atomizing forces of modernity, who argued, further-
more, that north and south, the United States and Latin America, would
one day fuse, the former contributing its institutions, the latter its artistic,
Catholic and indigenous spirit. But in the wake of World War II, with the
292  R. T. CONN

United States having emerged as the premier world power, with certain
Latin American nations having supported the axis powers and with the
Pan American Union having come to an end, Frank redefines the critical
terms of his romantic discourse. Jettisoning his hemispheric Marxist-­
inspired vision that subsumed the United States and his America Hispana—
the latter the title of an earlier work—into one totalizing process, Frank
now presents the nations of the hemisphere as distinct entities with their
own traditions and turns to race and Freudianism for a kind of universal
hermeneutic. He continues to subscribe to the idea of radical cultural dif-
ference between the Anglo Protestant north and the Hispanic Catholic
South, but he presents his humanistic Bolívar who stood for centralism as
an alternative to democracy at a moment in which the United States, he
asserts, needed to understand the Latin American nations as having politi-
cal traditions different from one another. As we have seen, Pan Americanism
also provided a space for Latin Americans to advocate for interests at odds
with the official positions of the United States. Frank’s Pan Americanism,
which now stood against the liberal, constitutional Bolívar promoted by
figures like Guillermo Sherwell, represents an attempt at updating that
tradition for a United States that was openly supporting the Latin American
military. Frank will continue to be interested in social classes but what he
argues for now is cohesion of those classes. As for one of Bolívar’s most
important influences, the Geneva philosopher Jacques Rousseau, he will
keep a distance. In the opening pages of his history, he attributes the rise
of communism to Rousseau’s idea of natural man.20
Considering Frank’s new understanding of Latin America and also his
project to educate the US public on the region, one cannot underestimate
the significance that Freudianism had for him. For here was a critical lan-
guage that was fast being internalized by his readership and that offered
the possibility, when applied to individuals from another culture, of mak-
ing them seem less remote and foreign. Indeed, Freudian categories
allowed Frank the possibility of comparing cultures and individuals accord-
ing to a universal language. The self, the ego, and the nuclear family are
deployed. For instance, where Frank perceives that his “Anglo-Saxon”
reader may disapprove of Bolívar’s conduct, as when Bolívar allegedly con-
ceitedly praises Santander by comparing him to himself, he tells his reader
that Catholic culture allows for confessionals, meaning exhibitions of the
self.21 Similarly, sexual desire, a central topic for Freud, must also be under-
stood, not against a strict moral standard, but as a practice that satisfies a
 11  BOLÍVAR IN THE WAKE OF WORLD WAR II: GERHARD MASUR…  293

need in the context of “the fatigue of a hard day, in the saddle.” Frank
speaks of how Bolívar relaxes by throwing himself into his intellectual
labors and also by giving himself up to dancing, and how a frail-bodied
Bolívar who did not smoke and who drank “at most a glass of wine at
dinner” unwound by other means. “Probably his brief hours with women
were his best respite from the pain and tension that never left him.”22
Bolívar’s sexual behavior was not morally compromised, but to be
understood in the context of rational needs familiar to a 1950s US
audience. Masur presents Bolívar as a don Juan. He was not that.
Freudianism permeates Frank’s text in other ways. An important instance
may be seen in how Frank finesses Bolívar’s association with Napoleon.
Masur makes much of that association. Frank would have to overcome that
identification in order to define the figure he imagines in terms of the
Hispanic/US Anglo-Saxon binary that informed his writings. To invent a
Hispanic Bolívar with dictatorial power—an enlightened despot—Frank
submits that in spite of all that Bolívar said against Spain, in spite of his state-
ments celebrating French rationalism and Anglo parliamentary government,
he unconsciously embodied not only that which was Spanish, but also, in
particular, the Spanish theocratic will suppressed by the modern secular state
following the reign of Felipe II. As Frank explains it, Bolívar’s military and
political quest for unity, his desire to overcome the geographical and politi-
cal fragmentation of the Spanish colonies mirrors Castilla’s quest to over-
come the fragmentation of Iberia. But Frank, in presenting Bolívar as being
in his psychological make-up of the crusades, drawing on a mythical con-
struction of Spain’s past used by the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco
(1939–1975), a Spain defined at the same time by the multiple cultural heri-
tages spoken of by the twentieth-­century Spanish historian Américo Castro,
also situates Bolívar alongside the Spanish colonist-turned-friar and historian
Bartolomé de Las Casas and Cervantes, individuals glorified as being true to
their ideals just as Bolívar was to his.23 To the US public it was thus to be
made clear that Bolívar understood the value not only of arms, but also of
letters. He was a sophisticated man of culture.
Frank’s use of Freudian categories to locate Bolívar in the Spanish tradi-
tion is similarly in evidence in his commentary on Bolívar’s aide-de-camp
Luis Peru de Lacroix’s “Diario de Bucaramanga” (“Diary of Bucaramanga”),
a document frequently referenced to attest to the Francophile Bolívar and
also used by Masur. In an ingenious reflection on the limits of philology,
Frank problematizes the value of the diary as a source, stating that the text
itself is no more than the product of the peculiar intersection of Lacroix’s and
Bolívar’s knowledge bases. If in their encounter, made famous by the text,
294  R. T. CONN

Bolívar expounds on French rationalism, this is not because, Frank argues,

Bolívar prefers French culture to Spanish, but rather because the French
tradition is what the aide-de-camp and Bolívar shared as a cultural reference
and what permitted them to exchange their views. Indeed, had Lacroix’s
cultural competence been different, had he possessed knowledge of the
Spanish tradition, Bolívar then would have steered their conversations in this
direction, with the result being a different “Diario de Bucaramanga.” As for
the playful, light-­hearted man Lacroix also portrays, Frank directly attacks the
author as a shallow interpreter of human beings, faulting him for his inability
to perceive the psychological Bolívar, the figure who in this, the later part of
his life was given to Freudian hysteria:

A deeper man than Lacroix would have observed the hysterical mask in his
gaiety, the emotional defense in his denial of the forces that created him, his
thirst for shallow waters as the sea he had released roared at his head. A man
more widely read than Lacroix would have guessed the relation between
Bolívar and Cervantes, who also saved himself from the bitter fire of his love
for mankind by the invention of a ridiculous figure.24

Bolívar was on an impossible mission like Don Quijote: to create a unity

that had never existed, seeking to overcome Hispano American forces that
tended toward fragmentation. But, interestingly, as we see in other exam-
ples too, Frank never names Freud. To a US readership that was accus-
tomed to using Freudian categories including Freudian hysteria as a matter
of course, the anachronism that was the proposition that Lacroix was
unable to see a Bolívar overcome may well have gone unnoticed.
If Freudian interpretive categories allowed Frank to claim Bolívar as part
of a Hispanic tradition that included Bartolomé de las Casas and Miguel de
Cervantes, they also permitted him the possibility of defining Latin America
as unwhole psychologically and as requiring for this reason strong leader-
ship. The idea of Latin America as an aesthetic utopia that would fuse with
the United States, overcoming industrialization and fragmentation, was no
more. Frank now speaks of internal divisions in Latin America that were
racial, social, cultural, political, and geographic. The dictator Bolívar, by
virtue of his Spanish heritage, stood above these divisions for most of his
career, showing himself to be able to marshal his generals, enter and con-
quer the Orinoco, win the respect of the R ­ oosevelt-­like “roughrider” Páez,
and prove himself to be indifferent to wealth and blind to race.
 11  BOLÍVAR IN THE WAKE OF WORLD WAR II: GERHARD MASUR…  295

The case of the general Manuel Píar is especially deserving of our atten-
tion. Frank, rather than question Bolívar’s decision to execute the pardo
Píar (referred to as mulatto) for insubordination, explains this act as neces-
sary to the consolidation of Bolívar’s authority. He states that Bolívar
could have also executed the creole Santiago Mariño but that for strategic
reasons he elected not to do so. But Frank makes Bolívar’s decision into
something more than an act of expediency. He also finds in it evidence of
a leader who like US President Abraham Lincoln, a popular international
icon in the 1930s and 1940s and a figure to whom he compares Bolívar at
the end of the history, is not racist. In fact, Frank eliminates race as provid-
ing an explanation for the motivation of either party. He writes that Píar
did not see Bolívar through that filter but through that of the family, par-
ticularly the relationship between father and son. His letters, we are told,
reveal that Píar was not planning a social revolution. Píar was testing
Bolívar to see if Bolívar’s love for him was unconditional. Sadly, he finds
out that Bolívar’s love was not. Píar dies not as a result of organizing the
pardo community but as a result of testing the father.25 Freud’s concept of
the family provides the interpretive framework.
Bolívar does not see race, we are supposed to think, but when it comes
to those who are below Bolívar in Frank’s racial hierarchy, they are
prevented from seeing Bolívar correctly by virtue of who they are racially.
Freudianism, as we have just seen, is an interpretive pillar for Frank’s new
race thinking, which is informed by the Jim Crow United States in which
he lived. Frank’s Latin America is like the United States of his time, a
region in which white is white and black is black with everything else
standing for non-­being. Bolívar, he states, was a mantuano who was secure
in his ego; those who were bi- or multi-racial, “born of mixed races,” as he
states, were not. “The American world,” he writes, “was too unwieldy; the
mixture of bloods blurred each traditional code of conduct; the children
of Spain and America felt themselves abandoned by the bonds of either
world.”26 This is not all. Frank also speaks of the so-called dark races.
What a radical shift! From one who fetishized Latin America as a
Catholic aesthetic whole defined by its arts and holding the promise of
complementing an overly rational north in a unified hemisphere, Frank
has become a deeply disturbing race thinker who, in presenting non-mix-
ing as the condition of being, pathologizes the majority of Latin Americans,
thereby going against the growing view of twentieth-century intellectuals
from the region which was to celebrate racial hybridity. His trip to
Venezuela as well as the bulletins of the Venezuelan Bolivarian Society and
of the Pan American Union had laid out for his viewing the patrician white
296  R. T. CONN

or mantuano invented by Vicente Lecuna. Forget Gil Fortoul’s account of

racial mixing in Bolívar’s family and among mantuanos and of the
mantuanos’ use of the category of whiteness to create a racial hierarchy in
his 1930 Historia constitucional de Venezuela. With Lecuna’s Bolívar as his
standard, Frank constructs and targets a non-white Latin America. We are
told that Bolívar is deified by one group and demonized by another, but
never seen objectively. The reason has to do with the effect of being mixed
blood on one’s sense of the self in relation to ego and power:

Since the people’s mixed bloods made them suspect to themselves, Bolívar
had to be the ‘world’s greatest warrior,’ the ‘world’s greatest statesman, the
world’s greatest lover’. His black legend flourished, too. To the ‘little nation’
men, to egos hurt by his own, to the libertarian fanatics, he was the satanic
tyrant, the fraudulent soldier who never won a battle.27

Central to Frank’s race-based reconstruction of Bolívar as an enlight-

ened, theocratic leader is the debate involving Bolívar and Francisco de
Paula Santander. Indeed, Frank was familiar with the defences of Bołvar as
well as the critiques, the latter as seen in Martí’s 1893 address, in Belaúnde’s
1938 treatise, and in the Colombian tradition. The controversy between
the two concerns Bolívar who in his political battle with Santander declared
a dictatorship, executed would-be assassins, exiled Santander, thought to
be behind the assassination attempt on him, and continued to defend his
state using military force. Previous to the crisis of authority, Bolívar had
undermined Santander who had long been acting president of the Gran
Colombia, setting off the conflict between the two. He conceived of a new
state to take the place of the Gran Colombia, and supported Páez in his
dispute with Santander. Frank concedes Bolívar’s guilt, presenting him as
standing against the law, Santander, and the union of the Gran Colombia.
Yet he also comes back to defend Bolívar, as in fact figures like Belaúnde
do, as an individual essentially heroic whose positions from 1825 on were
lapses, prompted by human weaknesses, most notably the vanity encour-
aged by an overindulging, mothering Manuela Sáenz, and by the
Liberator’s distance from the people of the Gran Colombia.
One important way in which Frank defends Bolívar is by questioning
the basis of a view of Santander and Bolívar constructed, as we will see in
the following chapter, by Liberals in the Colombia of the 1930s and
1940s. What of Santander as the statesman who embodies the law and
 11  BOLÍVAR IN THE WAKE OF WORLD WAR II: GERHARD MASUR…  297

Bolívar as the military leader who flouts procedure? Frank argues that this
view was conceived negatively, on the basis of allegedly illegal acts per-
formed by Bolívar, rather than “legal” ones performed by Santander, who
at an earlier moment had in fact agreed with Bolívar that a greater good
lay in the strong executive privilege afforded by Act 128 of the Cúcuta
Constitution granting the executive extraordinary measures as circum-
stances might require with the consent of the congress or on his own if the
congress is not in session.28 Against Colombian Liberals’ newly idealized
law-bearing Santander, Frank recuperates a familiar image of Santander
that his recent champions had sought to shunt aside, that of the figure
portrayed by Bolívar, that is, the leader who is master of party politics. To
build up this image of him for his Pan American public, he likens Santander
to the leaders of Tammany Hall, the name given to the Democratic
machine that dominated New York City politics from the 1850s through
the 1940s, Santander a forerunner of the proverbial politician of modern
industrial democracies gone amuck. Santander panders to the people, we
are told, offering the roads and administration they want rather than the
unity they need and can only obtain through sacrifice. In contrast, Bolívar,
visionary that he purportedly is, having a commitment to the greater
union that was Colombia and beyond, never gives up on his concept of a
unified Latin America, refusing to curry favor with a “public” that is only
able to see and understand those things that are immediate. Here, in a
gesture typical of the modernist intellectual for whom politics is a lowly
activity, Frank defines Bolívar as transcendent, alleging that he rose above
the political, while he defines Santander as “mundane.” It is accepted that
during his dictatorship Bolívar played politics with Catholicism, banning
from the university curriculum the secularist Bentham whom he, in fact,
admired. But for Frank, Bolívar makes no concessions to the political or
material, remaining true to his vision of “spiritual” unity, a vision that
increased his stature for posterity but decreased it for his contemporaries.
Freud continues to be important as he uses the category of the ego to
describe Santander and Bolívar. Contrasting the two figures, he presents
Bolívar’s ego as being housed within a tradition—the Hispanic—whereas
he describes Santander’s ego as existing alone, there being no, let us say,
cultural superego to which it is subordinated or that it must mediate.
Frank’s Bolívar, as we are seeing, was the bearer, then, not of
Enlightenment ideas, or of modern democracy, as Rómulo Betancourt
hoped it would when he invited Frank to produce the work, but rather of
a Hispanic Catholic theocratic tradition predating the secular state. Other
298  R. T. CONN

writers and intellectuals, in using the Bolivarian legacy, had spoken of the
rivalry of Bolívar and Santander with regard to the nature and viability of
the Gran Colombia. Frank, as we have seen, was doing something differ-
ent. As he explicitly states at the end of his narrative, he sees in the two the
destiny of Latin America. This would be a Latin America defined by the
battle of civilization and barbarism, with either Venezuela or Colombia
prevailing.
As we said at the beginning of this discussion, it was all about 1948, the
year of the military coup in Venezuela against Gallegos and of the bogotazo
in Colombia which occurred in reaction to the assassination of the popu-
list Liberal politician Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, just days after the start of the
Ninth International Conference of American States at which US Secretary
of State George Marshall gave the opening speech. Never mind Gaitán,
Frank interprets this event, which initiated the ten-year period in
Colombian history known as La Violencia—a period that would establish
the conditions of polarization that would be in evidence in Colombia for
decades ahead—as a sign of a Colombia that was essentially barbaric. What
is more, Frank represents it as part of a tradition clearly identifiable with
Santander, the result not only of what he sees as Colombia’s modern-day
factionalist political structure, but also when seen historically from within
his Pan Americanist frame, of, to be sure, the Tammany Hall-like political
apparatus that had allegedly been put in place by Santander a good cen-
tury before, in the 1820s and 1830s. Santander, as Frank writes, had sent
Colombia on a course quite different from the one purportedly followed
by the rest of Latin America, above all Venezuela, where leadership and
the so-called volk had not drifted apart, still tied together by a common
Catholic and aesthetic spirit. Frank describes Juan Vicente Gómez as hav-
ing had a connection to that common spirit, just as he does certain
Venezuelan writers. Herein, precisely in the distance between the nation’s
elites and the volk or masses, lay the reason for the political factionalism
and civil war that had wreaked havoc on Colombia.
Frank was not alone in deploying Santander in this way, as Masur simi-
larly used him as a straw man to formulate his iteration of Bolívar. Masur,
borrowing the title from Vallenilla Lanz’s 1919 work, describes Bolívar’s
1828–1830 dictatorship as a form of democratic Caesarism, presenting his
authority as emanating from military leaders and from parts of the bureau-
cracy. He goes on to characterize the individuals behind the assassination
attempt as Jacobins, some having come directly from France even. And
Santander, in his role as Colombian ambassador to the United States, was
 11  BOLÍVAR IN THE WAKE OF WORLD WAR II: GERHARD MASUR…  299

one who had the legal duty, never mind the moral one, to report what he
knew to Bolívar. Santander confessed, Masur states, that he did in fact
have knowledge of the assassination plans.29 As for Bolívar, Masur cele-
brates him for commuting the execution sentence handed down by the
military court, presenting his decision as a reflection of Bolívar’s ability to
overcome the human desire for revenge and as an example of reason van-
quishing passion, though also stating that there was a practical end—
avoiding an uprising among the people.
The two drew from both the Venezuelan and Colombian traditions,
where the Bolívar-Santander binary had long existed as a major critical axis
for national politics. Writing when they were, though, they were following
the Venezuelan interpretive line that goes through Vallenilla Lanz and all
the way to Hugo Chávez, who in the early years of his presidency compared
the then president of Colombia, Alvaro Uribe, to Santander.30 As Chávez
had it, both Uribe and Santander were guilty of betraying Latin America
to the United States: Santander, when he invited US representatives to
attend the 1826 conference organized by Bolívar in Panama; Uribe, in his
support of Plan Colombia. This program signed by Bill Clinton and
Andrés Pastrana in 1999 and after 2015 known as Peace Colombia has
had as its stated goal terminating coca cultivation and providing military
training to the Colombia armed forces to end armed conflict.
Finally, to formally pose the question whose answer may already be
obvious, what of Rómulo Betancourt? How would he have regarded
Frank’s biography? Betancourt, who, as we know, found himself in exile
(in Washington, New York, Cuba, Costa Rica, and Puerto Rico), embat-
tled with Pérez Jiménez and also with the Venezuelan Communist Party,
which saw him as a sell-out, would have hardly been pleased. To the con-
trary, he would have felt betrayed, having invited Frank to assist in the
construction of a democratic Venezuela based on political parties only to
see him follow the lead of the generals who ousted him from power, pro-
ducing a Pan American Bolívar who stood for dynastic law and attacking,
through his narrative about Colombia and Santander, democracy as a via-
ble system in Latin America. His positive statement about Juan Vicente
Gómez as representing a principle of stability would have been particularly
disturbing. Venezuela, in Frank’s account, was to lead the way in the
hemisphere still, but hardly in the manner hoped for by this major
Venezuelan politician who returned to Venezuela to win the 1959 elec-
tions—after the military coup ousting Pérez Jiménez in 1958 had cleared
the way for them. As we will see in the next chapter, Frank’s tome did not
go unanswered.
300  R. T. CONN

Notes
1. Leopold von Ranke, Ed., George G.  Iggers, The Theory and Practice of
History (London: Routledge, 2011), 91.
2. Ibid., 50–53.
3. Gerhard Masur, Simón Bolívar (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico
Press, 1969), vii.
4. See Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-­
Century Europe (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1973), 176. “Like Ranke, Michelet was a historian of the Restoration,
though he experiences that period of history in which he wrote in a way
precisely opposed to Ranke’s experience of it. What Michelet suffered as a
fall away from the ideal, a postcoital depression, as it were, Ranke enjoyed
as a consummation, but a consummation in the literal sense of the term. It
was not, as in Michelet’s conception of the revolutionary moment, a point
at which unity was achieved by the elimination of the barriers which had
been artificially erected to prohibit the people’s union with itself, but was
rather a genuine integration of elements formerly at odds with themselves
and with one another within a higher form of community, the nation-state
and the international system in which each nation-state had its place and
functioned as necessary part of the whole.”
5. José Manuel Groot, Ecclesiastical and Civil History of New Granada
(Bogotá: M. Rivas & ca., 1889–1893).
6. Masur, 491–492. See reference to El Pasatiempo, No. 16, December 6,
1851, Archivo Bolívar, Caracas.
7. Masur, Simón Bolívar, viii and 489.
8. Ibid., 489.
9. Ibid., 477.
10. See: https://www.oldtimeradiodownloads.com/drama/the-cavalcade-of-
america/bolivar-the-liberator-1941-10-06 for a download of the original
broadcast.
11. See Matthew J. Flynn and Stephen E. Griffin, Washington and Napoleon:
Leadership in the Age of Revolution (Dulles, VA: Potomac Books, 2012),
200.
12. Ibid., 104–105.
13. Ibid., 103–104.
14. Masur, Simón Bolívar, 186–187.
15. Ibid., 186, 187. See page 245 where Bolívar continues to be portrayed as
creating out of nothing.
16. Ibid., 177.
17. Ibid., 187.
 11  BOLÍVAR IN THE WAKE OF WORLD WAR II: GERHARD MASUR…  301

18. Fernando Coronil, The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in
Venezuela (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1997), 146–147.
19. Waldo Frank, Birth of a World, Bolívar in Terms of His Peoples (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1951), 392–395.
20. Ibid., 25.
21. Ibid., 202.
22. Ibid., 105.
23. Ibid., 406–407.
24. Ibid., 346.
25. Ibid., 152.
26. Idem.
27. Ibid., 410.
28. Ibid., 329–330. For another view of Article 28, see Brian Loveman, The
Constitution of Tyranny: Regimes of Exception in Spanish America
(Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1993), 142–143. Loveman
speaks of Article 128 as evidence of how the Cúcuta Constitution provides
for a constitutional regime of exception.
29. Gerhard Masur, Simón Bolívar, 352–358.
30. “‘Yo soy hijo de Bolívar’, y Uribe, ‘un traidor’, de Santander: Hugo
Chávez,” accessed July 2019 http://www.zocalo.com.mx/new_site/arti-
culo/soy-hijo-de-bolivar-y-uribe-un-traidor-de-santander-hugo-chavez.
 CHAPTER 12

The Bolívar-Santander Polemic

in Colombia: Germán Arciniegas
and Gabriel García Márquez

Almost as extraordinary as the fact that Simón Bolívar crossed the Andes
twice, penned thousands of letters, and survived every battle he entered
unscathed is that in the Americas in the last century and a half he has
served in so many different ways and contexts as a lightning rod for politi-
cal and scholarly debate. Nowhere has the polemicity surrounding Bolívar
been more evident and perhaps more institutionalized than in the nation
of Colombia. For here, since the late 1820s, to speak of Bolívar is to speak
of a figure locked in a seemingly timeless dispute with his one-time
comrade-­in-arms and cohead of state, Francisco de Paula Santander.
Here are the facts that gave rise to the dispute and to the Bolivarist and
Santanderist parties. Following the victory at Ayacucho on December 9,
1824, and the creation of Bolivia in 1825, a movement developed in
Venezuela to institute a new model of government in the Gran Colombia.
The Gran Colombia was the multiregional state founded as a republic in
1821 whose territorial limits combined those of the old viceroyalty of
New Granada, what is today present-day Ecuador and Colombia, and
those of the captaincy general of Venezuela. As Frank Safford and Marco
Palacios explain, within the Gran Colombia, Caracas elites felt marginal-
ized from power and in competition with New Granadans, cut off as they
were from the capital, Bogotá, by the Andes.1 Regional autonomy became
the issue, and for some in the elites, the solution was a constitutional mon-
archy or secession. Bolívar himself had grown discontent with the political
form of the Gran Colombia, having heard reports from Bogotá of alleged

© The Author(s) 2020 303

R. T. Conn, Bolívar’s Afterlife in the Americas,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26218-1_12
304  R. T. CONN

financial mismanagement, overemployment of workers in the govern-

ment, and the proliferation of incomprehensible laws. When asked, then,
by the Bolivians, who had named their newly formed nation after him, to
create a constitution, he seized upon this opportunity to right his ship, so
to speak, establishing a new model of governance that, as Frank Safford
and Marco Palacios tell us, incorporated the monarchical and federalist
elements desired by different elite factions in Caracas.2
With the Bolivian Constitution serving as a blueprint and convinced
that the Gran Colombia was not viable, Bolívar from 1826 to 1828 cam-
paigned for a new union called the Federation of the Andes in which Peru
and Bolivia would be added to the three existing departments; in which
each constituent department of the new, expanded state would enjoy rela-
tive autonomy; and in which he would serve as lifetime president, moving
from one province to the next as a kind of monarch.
Santander, Bolívar’s one-time comrade-in-arms and acting president of
the Gran Colombia during the time that Bolívar led the military campaign
in Ecuador and Peru and presided in the latter as appointed dictator,
opposed the plan, if only because by law no new constitutional convention
was to take place until a full ten years after the Cúcuta Convention of
1821. As Palacios and Sanford explain, he also opposed the plan because
he was fearful of a Bolivarian dictatorship, military or otherwise, and
because, more generally, like other New Granadans and members of the
legal profession, he was suspicious of the military leaders or liberators,
many of whom were Venezuelan.3 After all, Bolívar, in what was another
element of the dispute, had sided with General Antonio Páez when the
Congress of the Gran Colombia called him to Bogotá to appear before
them and he refused. As the dispute between the two intensified, with the
Santanderist and Bolivarian factions coming into being, an agreement was
reached to hold a constitutional convention at Ocaña three years earlier
than stipulated by the Cúcuta Constitution. But at the Ocaña Convention,
which lasted from April 9–June 10, 1828, the conflict worsened. There,
Santander was accused by Bolívar’s delegates of manipulating the congress
and of supporting the pardo general, José Prudencio Padilla who had
declared himself intendant of Cartagena. Bolívar, who did not attend the
Convention, camping instead in Bucaramanga, a more strategic location
than Ocaña, decided to remove his delegates when told of the certainty of
a Santander victory, thereby leaving the body without a quorum.
Turmoil followed, but this was not all. The Gran Colombia was attacked
by Peru at Guayaquil in late June of 1828, putting an end to the idea of the
 12  THE BOLÍVAR-SANTANDER POLEMIC IN COLOMBIA: GERMÁN…  305

greater union of the Federation of the Andes. On August 27, two months
after the Ocaña Convention, and shortly after expelling the Peruvian forces,
Bolívar, encouraged by his many supporters, moved to legitimize the
dictatorial power he in fact had held since the beginning of the dispute by
formally declaring a provisional dictatorship for the Gran Colombia. He
justified the act by saying there was no constitution to fall back on, the
constitution of 1821 having been abrogated, and specifying that the
dictatorship would cease upon the meeting of a constitutional convention
on January 2, 1830.
But on September 25, four weeks into Bolívar’s dictatorship, a group of
New Granadan students and officers associated with Santander made an
unsuccessful attempt on the leader’s life. In the weeks that followed Bolívar
summarily executed 14 individuals suspected of participating in the assassina-
tion attempt and exiled Santander, thought to be the inspiration behind the
conspiracy. Less than a year and a half later, true to his word, Bolívar ceded
his authority, as he did on other occasions in his career, to the new constitu-
tional congress he himself convened, El Congreso Admirable (The Admirable
Congress) or El Congreso de Bogotá (The Congress of Bogotá). As for
Santander, following Bolívar’s death on December 17, 1830, the dissolution
of the Gran Colombia, and the founding of the new state, he returned in
1832 to become the first president of the Republic of New Granada.
After Santander’s return, leaders and regional caudillos continued to
have armed struggles against one another, and against the backdrop of the
Bolivarist and Santanderist blocs. Those blocs became, respectively, the
Conservative Party in 1849 and the Liberal Party in 1848, or as the Liberal
Party decades later momentarily called itself, the Radical Party. There is a
wide scholarship on these political parties that came to be significant as
engines of conflict. US historian David Bushnell explains how the brand-
new parties transformed into spaces of identification for the national pop-
ulace, seemingly overnight:

But one may hypothesize that the experience of the 1850s—marked by suf-
frage extension, frequent campaigns, and an absence of election irregularities
of sufficient magnitude to rob the process of its meaning—played an impor-
tant part in the development of the Colombian party system. The two major
parties, Liberal and Conservative, had only recently taken shape as more or
less cohesive national forces; and they were now compelled to build a mass
following for electoral purposes. Citizens responded to the summons to the
polls in satisfactory if not overwhelming numbers, and their i­dentification
306  R. T. CONN

with their respective parties was thus being hardened by electoral combat even
before it was reinforced by the traumatic cycle of civil warfare that marked the
period from 1860 to 1903.4

In the civil wars of the second half of the nineteenth century,

Conservatives supported the idea of a centralized state that would be
based on a strong executive and identified with the Church. For their part,
Liberals or Radicals, dominated by the oligarchs who were ever jealous of
their local rights, promoted a federalist, meaning regional, model for the
state, one with a strong legislature. That model became the blueprint for
the nation with the adoption in 1863 of the Rionegro Constitution, which
elevated departments or regions to the status of states and secured for
them the right to mint their own currencies and raise their own armies.
As for the Bolívar-Santander binary, it would not become an axis of
political discourse until the scholar and orator Miguel Antonio Caro, act-
ing on behalf of his patron, the president of the republic, Rafael Núnez,
moved to use it to his advantage in the 1880s and 1890s to support his
project to centralize the state.
Forget the Santander of the 1820s who exercised power in the shadow
of Bolívar, and who in their dispute could be seen either as the intelligence
behind the attempt on Bolívar’s life and correctly sentenced, or as a figure
aggrieved, having had no part in the plot, or alternatively, having partici-
pated but rightfully so, standing up to dictatorship. Caro is interested in
another Santander, the one who assumes the presidency of the Republic
of New Granada after Generals José María Obando and José Hilario
López defeat the Bolivarist General Rafael Urdaneta to take Bogotá in
1831 and thus prepare for the winding down of the Gran Colombia.
Urdaneta had revolted against Joaquín Mosquera, elected president by
the Admirable Congress, to bring the assassins of Antonio José de Sucre,
killed in cold blood on June 4 of 1830, to justice. Obando was likely to
have given the order. Caro, in recuperating the Santander of the 1830s,
eclipsed by the earlier figure immortalized in his duel with Bolívar in the
1820s, plays on Santander’s reputation as the Man of Laws, a moniker
given to him by Bolívar and handed down in the tradition. He asserts that
during the time Santander was in office as president, he was incapable of
bringing about peace.5
But if Santander, when he finally exercised power in the context of the
new republic without the benefit of the Liberator’s authority, was unable
to create a stable order—one not characterized by military revolts, as Caro
 12  THE BOLÍVAR-SANTANDER POLEMIC IN COLOMBIA: GERMÁN…  307

underlines to diminish Santander’s figure—the Bolívar he and his patron

conceived of could.
Bolívar, in contrast to Santander—described as an ineffective leader with
no greater ideological projection than the law—represented the wholeness
of a usable cultural world, existing as a symbol of continuity with a Spain
defined as Catholic. Independence had not been a revolution, rather a civil
war among individuals of the same “ethnicity,” proclaims Caro in 1898.
Therefore, Colombian national culture needed not be understood in oppo-
sition to the Spanish.6 Caro, as the inventor of Colombian positivism, had
found in Santander his republican figure against which to position himself
using the nineteenth-­century French vision established by Auguste Comte
and Hippolyte Taine, namely that republicanism must be overcome in the
name of an administrative elite and in the name of national culture.
Santander, “the Man of Laws,” fit Caro’s needs perfectly.
Caro wrote and saw the enactment of the new centralist constitution of
1886 and he himself was the acting president from 1894 to 1898. His
goal was for Colombians to live their public lives as they lived their private
ones, to relate to one another above and beyond party and regional affili-
ations as Catholics who shared one and the same culture.7 How successful
was he in creating the conditions for peace among the traditional parties?
A year after his administration came to an end, the Liberals went to war
with the Conservatives. In this conflict, known as the Guerra de los Mil
Días, 1899–1902 (The Thousand-Day War), the Liberal Party (defined
during this time as the Radical Party) proposed restoring the old multire-
gional territory that was the Gran Colombia, seeking thereby to defeat
the Conservatives once and for all through the alliance they imagined
forging with similarly-minded Venezuelan and Ecuadorian leaders, most
notably the Venezuelan head of state, Cipriano Castro, who as we have
seen earlier, helped fund them. Ironically, the symbolic leader of their
resurrected Gran Colombia was Santander who, we know, in fact opposed
this union in the late 1820s in his battle with Bolívar. By the time the two
parties sought a resolution, more than a 100,000 people were dead, while
Panama was no longer a part of Colombia, having seceded with the sup-
port of a United States interested in using the isthmus to build a canal. A
process of reconciliation followed that saw the two parties sign two trea-
ties, the second on a secure site provided by the United States. This site
was the warship Wisconsin. In Colombian historiography, the Treaty of
Neerlandia, signed on a Colombian estate on October 24, 1902, and the
Treaty of the Wisconsin, signed one month later on November 21, have
308  R. T. CONN

existed as a discursive pair of sorts. García Márquez, for example, acknowl-

edges in his writings only the Treaty of Neerlandia, determined not to
mention the second, which is in fact considered the more definitive, so as
not to contribute symbolically to Colombia’s decades-long alliance with
the power to the north.
As for the vision of Santander and Bolívar in the twentieth century and
through the present, a major shift occurred in the 1930s and 1940s at the
hands of politicians, professional historians, and intellectuals, all linked to
a more progressive Liberal Party interested in land reform that had won
the presidency in 1930 after 44 years of Conservative rule. The place on
which they focused their attention was the congress, which in 1937 passed
an act declaring that Santander’s death would be celebrated in 1940, the
centenary of his passing; that the Archivo Santander would be reissued by
professional historians named by the state; that statues of Santander would
be sculpted, with the following words of Santander on one side of each:
“Las armas os han dado independencia, las leyes os darán libertad.” (“Arms
have given you independence, laws will give you liberty;”) and that on
May 6, 1940, “the two chambers of the congress would hold a meeting in
the same building in which was housed the Constitutional Congress of
1821;” and that at that solemn meeting would be read “the first Act of the
Constitutional Congress of Cúcuta and the address that Santander deliv-
ered upon assuming the position of vice-president of the Gran Colombia.”8
This shift, which prepared the way for Bolívar and Santander to be seen
differently in the political tradition, took the form of a national “restitu-
tion” of Santander, his association with the law now seen positively. Many
were the books that came out on the subject of the Colombian Santander
and Venezuelan Bolívar in this period, including El hombre de las leyes (The
Man of Laws) by Max Grillo (1940), one of the senators who proposed the
1937 act, and Santander y la Gran Colombia (Santander and the Gran
Colombia) by Jorge Hernández Carrillo (1940).9
Grillo and other writers and historians saw themselves as creating a
more serious and professional conceptualization of their field and a more
true vision of Colombia precisely by restoring Santander to his purport-
edly rightful place in the nation’s history. In the binary they constructed,
Bolívar stood for military and dictatorial or non-republican values, while
Santander stood for the rule of law, constitutionalism, and democracy.
Attempting to set the record straight, if not settle the score, Grillo charged
that Bolívar’s right-hand man, Urdaneta, violated the rights of Santander
by summarily sentencing him for his alleged involvement in the ­assassination
 12  THE BOLÍVAR-SANTANDER POLEMIC IN COLOMBIA: GERMÁN…  309

attempt. This amounted to an about-face for Grillo who decades earlier

had passionately defended the good name of Bolívar in his prologue to the
Bolivian historian Gabriel René-Moreno’s 1917 Ayacucho en Buenos Aires
y prevaricación de Rivadavia (Ayacucho in Buenos Aires and Rivadavia’s
Perversion of Justice), slamming René-Moreno for his attack on the 1826
Bolivian legislature’s decision to name his country for the Libertador
while in doing so making common cause with the Venezuelan historian
Laureano Vallenilla Lanz.10
For Grillo, Urdaneta and Bolívar were guilty of flouting the legal pro-
cess. Conservatives, however, did not remain silent, answering their Liberal
counterparts with a renewed attack on the legacy of Santander. In the years
ahead, the meaning of the two, together with their political affiliations,
would once again undergo profound changes in the wake of the three-day-
long city-wide riot of 1948 known as the bogotazo of which we have spoken
and the period of the so-called Guerra Chica (Little War) or La Violencia.
During this period, the Conservative Party-controlled state attacked farm-
ing towns in the countryside that were supporters of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán,
the populist leader who had taken the Liberal Party from the oligarchy and
whose assassination just ten days after the beginning of the March 30,
1948, meeting of the Organization of American States had set off the riot.
But by the time the Liberal Party had regained its footing and together
with the Conservatives decided to halt the violence—the two parties
agreeing to alternate in the executive and share equal control of the parlia-
ment for a period of 16 years in what is known as the period of the National
Front, beginning in 1958—new kinds of intellectuals and ideologues had
emerged, particularly from within the ranks of Liberals radicalized by the
experience of La Violencia. Among them was Milton Puentes, who pub-
lished in 1961 Breve historia del partido liberal colombiano (A Brief History
of the Colombian Liberal Party), a collection of essays celebrating
Colombia’s Liberal leaders of the late-nineteenth century, leaders whom
he defined as soldier-politicians willing to use violence to promote regional
interests against the central government.
Puentes’s canon of heroes consisted not only of figures from the years
of the Rionegro Constitution, but also of ones like Rafael Uribe Uribe,
who led the Liberals in the Thousand-Day War. In fact, the subject of one
of his essays was the town itself, Rionegro, invested with no small amount
of symbolism, the site of the signing of the 1863 constitution and a bastion
throughout modern Colombian history of federalist values.11 Puentes
published a similar book a year later, in 1962, this one titled Grandes
hombres de Colombia (Great Men of Colombia), in which he begins with
310  R. T. CONN

Santander, praising him for his conciliatory stance before the s­outhern
regional leaders defeated in the Guerra de los Supremos (War of the
Supremes) and as the Liberal leader who could have persuaded the
Conservatives in 1900 to make an offer to their counterparts such as to
avoid the horrible bloodshed. Puentes was reconstructing the Liberal
Party for the era of the National Front, pushing Santander to the left by
placing him in a canon that included Gaitán while describing Bolívar as
left-leaning and complementing Santander.12
But this vision of a Liberal Party uniting Gaitán, Santander, and Bolívar
would not be the one that would prevail. Colombian politics would both
consolidate and splinter during the 16 years of the National Front, with
the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) in fact for-
mally coming into being in 1958, the moment the first president in the
agreement of the Front took office, followed by the emergence of other
armed groups on the Left and of groups on the Right. In that process, the
Bolívar-Santander binary reappeared outside the boundaries of the party
politics that had prevailed since the 1820s with the armed Left appropriat-
ing Grillo’s and others’ characterizations of Bolívar as a military leader.
Although in some quarters the Left was critical of Bolívar for his concep-
tion of an executive-centered state, for the most part, it was laudatory of
him, with military groups celebrating his statement about the necessity of
violence in his Admirable Campaign crossing the Andes into Caracas—the
War to the Death—and leaders from those groups, scholars, and essayists
lauding his vision of a unified Latin America that would one day rise above
local elites or oligarchies. In 1964, with the figure of Bolívar having passed
to the Left, the elites reasserted their symbolic control over his figure,
founding the Bolívar Society.
The Bolívar Society would do the cultural and political work that the
pre-1948 Conservative Party had done, though not in the language of
Catholicism, which had been an ideological foundation of the party. In
1930, the year Liberals defeated Conservatives in the presidential elections
and the year that saw the centenary of Bolívar’s death—celebrated in Santa
Marta, and attended by the Pan American Union’s General Secretary Leo
Rowe—Colombia’s powerful Catholic prelates issued a statement asserting
that Bolívar’s actions were that of a Catholic, that he was responsible for the
survival of the Catholic Church with his politics of 1828–1830, and that in
their battle to defend the country against communism they as a group made
up of no less than “all the prelates of Colombia” stood with him.13
The Bolívar Society sought to unite the elites in a new secular under-
standing of their common social and economic interests. Its vision was one
 12  THE BOLÍVAR-SANTANDER POLEMIC IN COLOMBIA: GERMÁN…  311

based on national wholeness with foreign ideology enemy, just as it had

been for the old Catholic-based party. Formal two-party rule ended in 1974,
but the Liberal and Conservative Parties were allied more than ever, seeking
to contain Marxist-defined guerrilla groups. Fast forward to the late 1980s
and early 1990s. With the bicentennial of Santander’s birth (1990) and the
150th anniversary of his death (1992), it was as if Colombia had returned
to the 1930s and 1940s, as works about Santander from that period were
re-published. But Santander’s figure now existed differently in the state
machinery, both as a symbol of the old party factionalism and as a symbol of
a unified state, in the same way that Bolívar’s did, above and beyond the
parties. A Santander Society that complemented the Bolívar Society would
emerge to reflect that fact.
The Colombian state was battered. Colombia’s Palace of Justice, leveled
during the three days of the bogotazo in 1948, had since been reconstructed,
only to be destroyed again in 1985 when the government made the decision
to use tanks and other weapons to retake it from the Leftist group, M-19,
which held justices and staff hostage, all of whom were killed. Santander’s
words, “Colombians, the sword has given you independence, law will give
you liberty,” had presided majestically above its entrance, etched on a stone
slab. M-1 9 was to blame for the bloodshed but so was Colombia’s
Conservative president Belisario Betancur Cuartas. What added to the horror
was that some who died in the assault were killed not in the moments of the
breach of the building but when escaping the destruction, the military not
wanting witnesses to the bloodshed, whether they were M-19, justices, or staff.
With the Supreme Court justices who had been in their offices dead as
a result of guerilla and state action, where was the law? Who embodied it?
The 1990 Santander bicentennial provided not an answer, but a virtual
space of sorts to think about the matter of judgment. It played on the idea
of a Santander mistreated. To that end, with the Liberal president of the
country, Virgilio Barco Vargas (1986–1990), who had helped broker the
National Front in the 1950s, the Colombian National Academy of History
published numerous volumes of Santander’s letters while reediting for
publication works such as Grillo’s El hombre de las leyes (The Man of Laws).
The Library of the Presidency of the Republic also participated in the
publication feast, bringing out Prosecution of General Santander: As a
Consequence of the Event of September 25 in Bogotá, a volume containing
documents from Santander’s military trial and letters written by Santander
to Bolívar and others requesting he be allowed to go into exile, having
been told he would but finding himself held prisoner for months in the
312  R. T. CONN

prison at Fort Bocachica.14 The editor of the volume asked Colombians,

addressed in this way as a collectivity, to consider what was before them,
namely documents permitting a more complete view of the struggle
between the two fathers of the nation, Bolívar and Santander. As it consid-
ered the record of the trial of Santander along with the new documents
added, the nation was now judge and jury, or so it was imagined. But the
concern of the public was hardly to adjudicate the alleged abuse of
Santander at the hands of Bolívar, that abuse standing in for the abuse suf-
fered at the Palace of Justice, but to see to it that above and beyond any
state spectacles their contemporaries were brought to justice, whether
members of the previous administration responsible for the assault on the
Palacio de la Justicia or—the 1980s having seen the rise and eventual
dominance of the Medellín and Cali cartels—the capos and their allies,
including those in government.

Two preeminent twentieth-century Colombian intellectuals, Germán

Arciniegas and Gabriel García Márquez, looked at the relationship between
Santander and Bolívar in their essays and fiction, respectively. Arciniegas,
one of Latin America’s more prolific and enduring essayists, active as he was
from the late 1910s through 1990s and author of some 70 books, deployed
the two figures in multiple ways in the context of the ideological wars of the
twentieth century, both inside and outside Colombia. In one of the earliest
instances, in a 1932 essay Arciniegas wrote shortly after the 1930 elections
that brought a Liberal to the presidency, he celebrates the students of San
Bartolomé who sought to assassinate Bolívar on September 25, 1828, and
presents them as paradigmatic of student protests against dictatorship in
modern Latin America. He gives special attention to the national protest
against the United Fruit massacre of 1928. In a much later instance, he
published in 1984, just after the 1983 OAS celebration of Bolívar, a 345-
page tome, Bolívar y la Revolución,15 in which he critiques Bolívar as a
Europeanist who wanted Latin America to be in the British system while
celebrating Santander as an American thinker, committed to democracy.
In the case of García Márquez, let’s examine his 1989 book The General
in His Labyrinth,16 looking at it in the Colombian context rather than in the
light of, for example, The Autumn of the Patriarch,17 the author’s rendering
of modern Latin American dictators in the context of the world system or
dependency theory, published in 1975. García Márquez does not find his
way to the Bolívar he portrays simply by way of any of his earlier literary
enterprises. Rather, he arrives at his portrayal of the figure by way of the
Bolívar-Santander binary elaborated by his Colombian predecessors. In both
 12  THE BOLÍVAR-SANTANDER POLEMIC IN COLOMBIA: GERMÁN…  313

cases, we have before us intellectuals making use of the quarrel and extending
it in new ways both within the boundaries of the nation and beyond.

Germán Arciniegas: Pan Americanism, Colombia,

and a Democratic Latin America

Of the intellectuals who have reflected on the dispute, few did so with
more tenacity than Germán Arciniegas, who at the beginning of his career
established himself as an important critic of the hegemonic Conservative
Party. In 1919, he founded the Colombian Federation of Students, and in
1921 his first literary journal. This was followed by a stint in law school
and the beginning of his journalistic career at the prestigious newspaper El
Tiempo, where in 1926 he was made an editor. For his organizational work
with students and his journalism, he is credited with helping usher the
Liberal Party into power in 1930. In the 16 years that followed, he received
consular appointments abroad in addition to promotions at El Tiempo to
editor in chief and director. In the periods of 1941 to 1942 and 1945 to
1946, he served as minister of education, founding, during his first
appointment, two major Colombian cultural institutions: the Caro and
Cuervo Institute (1942) and the Colonial Art Museum of Bogotá (1942).
During his second appointment, he arranged for the relocation of the
important National Museum of Colombia (1948) to an old colonial prison
in Bogotá that he had remodeled. A Pan Americanist since the 1930s, dur-
ing the 1940s he took visiting professorships at US universities in the
United States while bringing out, with the assistance of the celebrated
translator Harriet de Onís, a series of books, including The Knight of El
Dorado, the tale of Don Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada and his conquest of
New Granada, now called Colombia (1942),18 Germans in the Conquest of
America (1943),19 The Green Continent: a comprehensive view of Latin
America by its leading writers (1944),20 and Caribbean: Sea of the New
World (1946).21 The publishing house, Alfred A. Knopf, which promoted
international authors for the US American public, provided a home for
each of them. As a public intellectual committed to education, be this in
Colombia or abroad, Arciniegas could not have plugged into the US edu-
cational sphere and professional market more effectively, producing with
the said works stories about the common European origins of the Americas,
with emphasis placed on the enterprise of discovery and exploration in
contrast to conquest and destruction. With regard to the United States, he
both celebrated and criticized it throughout his long career, using the
country’s democratic republican tradition as a standard for Latin America
314  R. T. CONN

to aspire to, seeking to dialogue with like-minded US American writers

and thinkers, and ripping into US support of Latin American dictators and
the military. In 1947, his connections to the United States long estab-
lished, he accepted a visiting professorship at Columbia University, in
flight from a Colombia in which the Conservative Party had regained the
presidency in the 1946 elections under suspicion of voter fraud.
The fraught elections were just the beginning, though, with
Colombia’s mid-century civil war about to unfold. On April 9, 1948,
Eliécer Gaitán, who had lost the 1946 elections but who in the interim
had risen to be the sole leader of the previously divided Liberal Party
with the mass support he had long enjoyed, was assassinated. This was
followed by the bogatazo, the closing of the congress in 1949 by President
Mariano Ospina Pérez and armed struggle between the two parties,
waged primarily in the countryside, with the presidency of the
Conservative Government occupied first by the Francisco Franco sup-
porter Laureano Gómez, followed by Roberto Urdaneta Arbeláez, and
then by Gustavo Rojas Pinilla.
Back in the United States as a visiting professor—his circumstances
those of an exile—the Pan Americanist Arciniegas had a bird’s-eye view
of the country’s political-­diplomatic academic structure just as it was
re-making itself in the postwar period. He saw the Pan American Union
celebrate its last meeting in Bogotá, many of the delegates unaware of
the assassination of Gaitán. He saw Truman’s 1951 meeting in
Washington, D.C. with envoys from Venezuela and Colombia, the same
countries that had just fallen to military dictatorship, as well as from
Perón’s Argentina, where freedom of the press had that same year been
ended, a meeting at which the participants became formal signatories to
the democratic principles agreed upon in Bogotá, all in accordance with
the 1947 anti-communist Truman Doctrine. Arciniegas also had before
him the phenomenon of certain US-based intellectuals who, riding the
coattails of the Bolívar craze from the 1920s through the 1940s, molded
Bolívar to promote US-based ideological consolidation and economic
expansion. There was Masur’s 1948 biography presenting a United
States poised to assume Bolívar’s mantle by realizing the project of
modernization he had not been able to; and Frank’s 1951 biography of
Bolívar as benevolent enlightened dictator with Santander as the self-
interested leader of a political machine. Frank’s biography, which
celebrates Venezuelan dictatorship at the expense of Colombia’s tradition
of political parties, was anathema to Arciniegas, who was a major
 12  THE BOLÍVAR-SANTANDER POLEMIC IN COLOMBIA: GERMÁN…  315

participant in the Liberal movement of the previous decades in Colombia,

raising Santander up from his oligarchic status to emblematize
republican ideology.
Seeking to respond to these new developments, Arciniegas produced a
book in which he took on the “hemisphere” in a manner that he could not
have imagined before, risking non grata status in many of the “twenty
countries” of which he spoke. We are referring to his tome of 1951 and
1952, a simultaneous publication in Spanish and in English, brought out
in Chile (1951), Mexico (1952), and Argentina (1956) under the title
Entre la libertad y el miedo (Between Liberty and Fear) and at Alfred
A. Knopf in New York (1952) as The State of Latin America. The work
received critical acclaim in the United States and was widely read in Latin
America, despite being banned in many countries including Colombia. It
served as an inspiration to underground groups organizing against
dictatorship, whom Arciniegas extolled in the book, and to future groups.
In it, he compared the political organizing of the times to the French
Resistance, and he attacked the nondemocratic, dictatorial regimes of
Latin America, underlining the US financial and military support that
helped to shore them up while detailing the United States’ different
foreign policies of the recent past, slamming Teddy Roosevelt’s, while
praising that of FDR, the latter for promoting democracy in Latin America.
In the chapter on Colombia, he explained that his country had had
18  years of democracy rooted in the educational legacy of Santander
(1930–1948). Liberal peasants worked for Conservative landowners, with
the latter having no concern about the possibility of violence. He cites
Santander’s words, “If arms have given us our independence, laws will
give us our liberty.”22 Santander, he insisted, was like Argentina’s great
educator and president, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, for the reason that
in the 1830s he founded more schools than Sarmiento did in Argentina
decades later. The government of Mariano Pérez Ospina changed that:

Little by little, he began modifying the organization of the police force,

which in the provinces was transformed into shock troops at the service of
the Conservatives. The Liberals were forced to resign their posts in the cabi-
net. Thousands of country people stood by as their houses were burned
down, many were killed, and part of Colombia’s inhabitants began to move
to Venezuela in search of peace. On the eve of the Pan American Conference
that was to meet in Bogotá, terror reigned in the provinces.23
316  R. T. CONN

His message, finally, was that Colombian Liberals were not communists
and that Conservatives had prompted the violence by virtue of their mili-
tarization of the countryside.
Arciniegas, who in 1953 wrote a scathing review of Frank’s biography
as well as of that of the Spaniard Salvador de Madariaga, whose 1951 biog-
raphy Bolívar presented not only Bolívar but all the major leaders of inde-
pendence as having authoritarian impulses, refused to allow the
Bolívar-­centered discursive world of the mid-century to go unchallenged.24
That world was complex, informed as it was, on the one hand, by a US
tradition that had celebrated Bolívar in collaboration with the Venezuelan
state; and on the other, by developments in his own country, where
historian and future star diplomat Indalecio Liévano Aguirre put a dent in
his republican Santander representing civil society with his biography of
Bolívar in 1949. As Arciniegas engaged with his on-the-ground reality as
an exile in New York City subsequent to the 1952 tome, his Santander in
tow, he turned his attention away from finding common cause with US
writers and academics to seek an alliance with those in Latin American,
while, at the same time, using Bolívar in a manner different from how he
used him in Colombia.
Repurposing the old cultural apparatus of the Pan American Union
with its vision of a Latin America made up of individual nations, each with
representative figures, Arciniegas draws a portrait of a region in which
there were no stable traditions, only actors—whether Left, Center, or
Right—who sought to overcome obstacles stemming from Latin America’s
colonial condition. Militarization, as seen in Colombia and Venezuela, as
well as fascism, were of particular concern to this intellectual now intent
upon using the North-South divide and the notion that ideas in Latin
America have always been embodied in politics–their defenders using
them to guide the nation—to create a centrist discourse in defense of
liberalism.
The work in which he articulates this problematic is his 1956 piece
entitled “El ensayo en nuestra América” (“The Essay in Our America”),
where he draws on Michel Montaigne’s famous short reflection that theo-
rizes the genre as a literary essai or attempt. Using Montaigne, Arciniegas
assimilates the extraordinarily varied work of Latin America’s writers,
thinkers, and intellectuals to the form of the essay, with Bolívar’s Jamaica
Letter standing as both an example of that genre as he is defining it and as
an emblem of the difference between Latin America and the United States.
Bolívar confronts issues that Washington never did. The United States,
 12  THE BOLÍVAR-SANTANDER POLEMIC IN COLOMBIA: GERMÁN…  317

being a colony that existed within the constitutional tradition of the British
monarchy, had all the elements necessary for it to develop.25
Latin America, a colony with no experience in self-government and
having a story of race different from that of the United States, faced chal-
lenges at every turn. The world of ideas was not an autonomous place for
reflection, but one in which ideas that have their origins in Europe and the
United States are immediately applied to define and shepherd the state,
re-elaborated to meet the needs of the new context and put into action in
the essai that is Latin America. Detailing their attempts to create and cri-
tique their societies, whether through liberalism, empire, race thinking, or
socialism, Arciniegas tells of actors forging and implementing their proj-
ects in what he presents as a constant effort at correction of the Spanish
legacy. Latin America, he asserts, is a revolution of ideas, starting with the
humanists and popular movements of resistance in the 1700s, going for-
ward into the nineteenth century with the Venezuelan Bolívar and the
Argentine liberal Sarmiento and the Cuban José Martí, and continuing in
the twentieth with the Mexican José Vasconcelos and the Peruvian José
Carlos Mariátegui. Providing a thumbnail sketch of these thinkers united
in their efforts to confront the inequality of social classes, the absence of
democratic traditions, the fact of races living together, and militarism,
Arciniegas asks that Latin American intellectuals understand that the
threat to the building of democratic civil societies has gone from the cau-
dillos of the nineteenth century to the new military dictators of the post-
war period with their modern military apparatuses and the support they
receive from the United States, apparatuses intended not for a third world
war but for internal use.26
The threat in particular he is referring to is Venezuela’s Marcos Pérez
Jiménez, though in his critique Arciniegas does little to differentiate
Venezuelan fascism from fascism in Europe nor does he distinguish Latin
American figures from one another, speaking in the same breath of Pérez
Jiménez, an ally of the United States; Argentina’s Juan Perón (1946–1952,
1952–1955) who brought heavy industry to his country and raised up
workers such as to create unions; and Bolivia’s Movimiento Nacional
Revolucionario (MNR), which in its early years, before it came to power
in 1952, had fascist elements. His attack on Pérez Jiménez is interesting.
To draw attention to the power of ideas in the public sphere of Latin
America and the need to advocate for those to which one subscribes,
Arciniegas tells of how Vallenilla Lanz’s Cesarismo democrático—the trea-
tise justifying Gómez’s regime and now, he alleges, undergirding the
318  R. T. CONN

administration of Pérez Jiménez—was translated into Italian in the decade

of the 1920s to form part of the ideological machine of Mussolini, defeated
by the allies in the War, he emphasizes.27 We could think that by telling the
story of the appropriation of a Venezuelan text by Mussolini’s Italy, he is
seeking to make Latin American fascism visible to a United States caught
in the labyrinth of its own prejudices and finding itself now on the wrong
side of history. This could be, but Arciniegas, who writes at the end of the
essay that writers should read both the discredited, as we know him to be,
Gobineau—the founder of Aryan racism—and the Cuban thinker
Fernando Ortiz—one of the great twentieth-century scholars on Afro-­
Cuban identity, is primarily interested in addressing and confronting Latin
American elites and intellectuals, to make them see the world in the way
that he saw it, namely that Latin American ideas have no reality indepen-
dent of the authors, political parties, and states that prevail in the moment
and make them real. There is no, according to Arciniegas, tradition of civic
culture. As for the matter of race, in a world saturated with white-centered
visions of Latin American liberalism, it is up to the current generation to
create new paradigms that embrace racial diversity.
But Arciniegas had not only one but two clear ideological antagonists.
First, as we have said, what he describes as Latin American fascism. Second,
with the 1959 Cuban Revolution, the Left. To frame his defense of liber-
alism in the face of both, Arciniegas celebrates the “national” Latin
American figures he finds in and around the Pan American canon. His
recuperation of the rioplatense José Gervasio Artigas in his 1962 essay,
“The Rights of Culture,” is particularly interesting in this regard. Artigas,
of whom a statue was erected on the lawn at the OAS building in
Washington, D.C., in 1950, sought to create a federation of the rio-
platense territories, and eventually, was elevated to the status of founding
father of Uruguay. Minimizing Artigas’s relationship to the world of let-
ters, and in particular Enlightenment thought, Arciniegas presents this
caudillo as a republican democrat with no education to speak of but who
nonetheless was able to establish a contract with his local constituency in
Uruguay, one that was spontaneous and of the kind between a leader and
a “people.”28 A similar strategy of reading can be seen in his 1959 essay
celebrating José Martí. Writing in the moment of the very beginning of
the Cuban Revolution, Arciniegas frames the Cuban thinker and leader as
a regional figure whose legacy was his defense of constitutionalism against
militarism. Emphasizing, as he does, Martí’s debt to New York and to the
east coast, where he presided over the reorganization of the Cuban inde-
 12  THE BOLÍVAR-SANTANDER POLEMIC IN COLOMBIA: GERMÁN…  319

pendence movement,29 an interpretive move conceived to shore up his

own exilic position as a Latin American in New York City, he speaks of
Martí as a young student standing up to the Spanish military;30 Martí as a
young adult rebuffing an invitation extended by the Venezuelan
president/dictator Guzmán Blanco during his visit to Venezuela to write
a tribute to him of the kind that he had just written for a recently deceased
Venezuelan;31 and Martí as an insurgent symbolizing civilian leadership to
the troops he commanded at the time of the invasion of Cuba: “¡Viva el
presidente de Cuba!” his soldiers shout.32
As Arciniegas reinstrumentalizes and widens the Pan American pan-
theon, bringing “North and South” together in the service of the civilian
Latin America he is constructing in and against the US policy of the 1950s
and the 1959 Cuban Revolution, he finds himself increasingly speaking of
Bolívar as opposed to the much lesser known and difficult-to-promote-in-
the-­international-sphere Santander. On the one hand, we see Arciniegas
use Bolívar in addition to other independence leaders to articulate a cri-
tique of military and dictatorial power. One narrative he adopts to per-
form this interpretive operation is a variation on the familiar account that
recognizes the definitiveness or transcendence of Bolívar’s military leader-
ship for the liberation of the South American continent, but critiques him
for not allowing the regions liberated to assume their territorial preroga-
tive. Deploying this narrative, Arciniegas constructs, though, a view of
Bolívar defined not by his descent from heroic and necessary military
leader to unrealistic or authoritarian head of state, but by the transition he
makes from military leader to willing exile.
Without speaking of Bolívar’s 1828–1830 dictatorship, for many an
assault on Colombia’s incipient republican tradition, as it is in other
instances for Arciniegas who prioritizes the moment in his 1932 piece to
mythologize student protest, he presents Bolívar as going peacefully into
exile despite having been wronged, deprived by Venezuela of the possibil-
ity of returning to his homeland, and therefore, to his mines. To this por-
trait of Bolívar, he adds other portraits that have as their subjects leaders
of independence that are similarly constructed for the purpose of building
a critique of military power for the entire continent and affirming the
expanse and historical depth of a region not reducible to the dictators of
the moment. The independence leaders portrayed are the Argentine José
de San Martín who resigns in order to place a limit on his own mandate,
affirming the principle of civil society; and once again, José Gervasio
Artigas who now is portrayed retiring to the countryside, spending the last
20 years of his life surrounded by only a few people. The major leaders of
320  R. T. CONN

independence, Arciniegas writes, are individuals who are self-made,

becoming generals by virtue of their acts, unlike the military leaders who
will populate the landscape of the nation states, colonels, and generals
who never enter the battlefield but who, nevertheless, decorate their jack-
ets with stripes and their egos with ranks while claiming to be descended
from Bolívar.33 Arciniegas is presenting a vision not of a culture of milita-
rism passed on to the new republics but one of exemplary military leaders
who walk away from their glory and power, leaders who are able to subor-
dinate themselves to civil society and who in doing so provide a lesson to
Latin America’s states. In what is a morality tale intended for mass con-
sumption constructed according to Pan American principles of representa-
tion, Latin America’s leaders of independence as a whole remove themselves
at the end of their careers from the political bodies they help to bring
into being.
Defenders of Francisco de Paula Santander in Colombia characterize
Santander as a champion of constitutional government and as an efficient
administrator during the time he was acting president of the Gran
Colombia and president of the República de la New Granada. They
describe him using the epithet famously coined by Bolívar: the Man of
Laws. His critics, on the other hand, many of whom have inherited con-
ceptions of him from the Venezuelan tradition, speak of his alleged
involvement in the Bolívar assassination attempt, his association with the
oligarchy, his alleged mismanagement of an important bank loan extended
by England to the Gran Colombia in 1824, his order to execute captured
royalist officers in 1819, and his legalistic attachment to procedure.
One such critic was the Liberal historian to whom we have referred,
Indalecio Liévano Aguirre, who in the late 1940s appropriated Bolívar
from the Conservative Party to produce a populist vision of his figure,
borrowing heavily from the cast of characters privileged in the Venezuelan
tradition, but also departing from that tradition, defined as it had been by
Vallenilla Lanz and Gil Fortoul before it was reimagined by the forces of
liberal reaction subsequent to the passing of Gómez. In contrast, then, to
Colombian Conservatives’ Catholic Bolívar and also, more obviously, per-
haps, to Colombian Liberals’ militarized version of Bolívar, Liévano
Aguirre constructed a figure who stood as a modern agent of the masses.
He defines Bolívar not by the racial hierarchies into which he was born but
instead by his descent from the Basques and their historic tensions with
the Spanish monarchy. In addition, he speaks of Bolívar’s conscious har-
nessing of the popular classes, whose instrumentalization at the hands of
 12  THE BOLÍVAR-SANTANDER POLEMIC IN COLOMBIA: GERMÁN…  321

the Spanish militias revealed to him their potential as an historical subject.

Liévano Aguirre, who is referring to the llaneros (plainsmen) who fought
first under the Royalist Boves, then under Páez, does not mention the
second leader who organized those forces and upon whom Bolívar
depended, nor does he give account of the new political situation in which
Bolívar found himself after the loss of the Second Republic. The years after
that loss saw him reconceive the manner in which he spoke of race and the
polis in a context that was not simply informed by his defeat at the hands
of the so-called popular forces of Boves. Liévano Aguirre’s Bolívar, freed
from the racial hierarchies into which he was born and in which he framed
his military and political positions, brings into his “Revolution” the
underclass of New Granada—subjects of a “national” space that Liévano
Aguirre carefully differentiates from that of Venezuela, stating that it was
not defined by racial hierarchies to the degree Venezuela was.34
Outfitting him with this new legacy, Liévano Aguirre will have Bolívar
stand for a nation that is committed to liberty and economic freedom, a
Colombia, furthermore, that will not bow to economic imperialism, in
what is an utterly new ideological framework informed by Colombia’s
resistance to multinationals including the infamous fruit companies.
Furthermore, this populist Bolívar, imagined in terms similar to Gaitán,
offers a dream that can be dreamt by all. He is not the product of the
Venezuelan upper classes, but rather of the universal values afforded by an
exemplary education. Indeed, Liévano Aguirre describes Bolívar as Émile,
meaning the character of Jacques Rousseau’s famous work of the same
name who learns to think and feel for himself, a work that Simón
Rodríguez, Bolívar’s childhood tutor, read, admired, and referenced often.
Years later, armed with the same Bolívar but having an agenda more
explicitly aimed at US-Colombian relations, Liévano Aguirre resuscitates
Bolívar’s plan announced at the Panama Congress in an attempt to drive a
wedge between the Latin American states and the OAS.35 The year was
1968 and the story of Bolívar’s education had receded into the back-
ground in the new narrative produced by the author. If for US Pan
­Americanists, the Panama Congress was a precursor to the hemispheric
unity represented by the Organization of American States, Liévano Aguirre
provides a different version of the congress’s history, opposing Bolívar’s
original plan to the OAS and blaming Santander and his “brethren” for
the congress’s failure. As he conceives it, Santander and his oligarchic
counterparts in Mexico, Chile, and Argentina undermined, even sabo-
taged, the congress by either not attending, forming other unions, as
322  R. T. CONN

Argentina did with Chile, or inviting US representatives to participate, as

Santander did, in spite of Bolívar’s call to exclude non-Spanish-speaking
parts of the Americas, most importantly the United States.36
Arciniegas had much to respond to and much, then, to recreate in his
intellectual work from the late 1940s forward. A defender of the Latin
American states’ membership in the OAS, though like others an intermittent
critic of it, he formulated from within Pan Americanism, as we have seen, a
Latin American constitutionalist tradition to oppose to the centralist
populist and military models of his time. Of concern to Arciniegas, then,
was also Liévano Aguirre, whose vision of Bolívar and Santander was no
less an obstacle to his democratic political idea than that of the postwar Pan
American cult of Bolívar that had arisen from within and without the Pan
American Union. Bolívar was not a liberal; he was not modern, Arciniegas
asserts in his 1984 Bolívar y la revolución latinoamericana.37 Proof of this,
Arciniegas maintains, was Bolívar’s strong interest in having the British
serve as protectors of Latin America, a view typical in his opinion of the
mindset of the military leaders of independence who saw in the enlightened
kingdoms of Europe the solution to the problem of stability and
development, not to mention security.
But showing that Bolívar is not modern was not all he had to do. He
also had to defend Santander, opposing the narrative describing Bolívar as
the mature leader who understands the pragmatic need for a centralized
state but whose plans are thwarted by minor leaders like the shortsighted,
if not venal, Granadan Santander. To this end, wherever in the Americas
or Europe he finds himself, whether Colombia, New York, or Paris,
Arciniegas presents Bolívar according to the critical vision elaborated in
the 1930s and 1940s in Colombia, though with slight differences vis-à-vis
the likes of Grillo and with changes to his profile in accordance with his
own contexts.
Grillo pays tribute to Santander as the Man of Laws while he also speaks of
what he suffers at the hands of those who violate his rights. In contrast,
Arciniegas, wanting a perfectly packaged symbol, free of resentment, gives his
audience only the so-called Man of Laws, the matter of injury to his figure left
out. This Santander will serve various functions. In his 1952 Entre el miedo y
la libertad where he assumes the voice of the Colombian people telling of the
campesinos (rural laborers), victims of the Colombian government’s air
campaign, Grillo explains that Colombia is ­democratic because of the legacy
of Santander. We have spoken of how he credits Santander with founding the
 12  THE BOLÍVAR-SANTANDER POLEMIC IN COLOMBIA: GERMÁN…  323

nation’s educational institutions. Building on that legacy, he asserts that

Santander is responsible for Colombia’s educated populace that from 1930 to
1948 showed itself to be capable of sustaining a liberal democracy in a way no
other Latin American populace had been able to in any time period. Arciniegas
is using Santander to make an argument for Colombian exceptionalism at a
moment the image of another Colombia is being burnt into the international
map, that of Conservative president Laureano Gómez who only served one
year in office, his term cut short by illness, but who in that time sent Colombian
troops to Korea—the only Latin American head of state to do so—in order
to reinvent himself after having supported Nazism in World War II.
Simultaneously, and with particular ferocity, he waged a war campaign at
home against the civilians of the countryside. Allying himself with the United
Nations and the United States not only held the promise of cleansing his past,
but also of giving him international political capital to prosecute the war
against the Gaitanista Liberals in a purportedly uneducated country in which
order needed to be restored.
By the 1980s, the conditions in Colombia changed with the ongoing
civil war and the drug cartels. Arciniegas no longer speaks of contracts
between leaders and citizenries, of an educated population capable of self-­
government, but of leadership pure and simple. Santander, the emblem of
the rule of law, as he was increasingly being made into by the Colombian
state, was, as he emphasized in his 1984 Bolívar y la revolución, also a fig-
ure who was able to dialogue in order to govern, particularly with Bolívar.
This view is plain to see in a 1991 essay devoted to Santander, a
response to García Márquez’s 1989 novel to which we are about to
turn.38 The days of access to the hemispheric stage, with publishers such
as the Alfred A. Knopf Press, long gone, ending with the closing of the
period of Pan Americanism and the beginning of a hemispheric politics
informed by the Cuban Revolution, the new professional academic orga-
nizations such as the Latin American Studies Association, and the emer-
gence of the novelists of the so-called Latin American Boom, Arciniegas
only had the Colombian stage at his disposal, in contrast to García
Márquez, who had command of both Colombian and international
audiences. Elevating Santander, as he always had, above his oligarchic,
white family lineage to modern political icon, Arciniegas goes back to
the beginning, the real beginning, as he would have it, of Colombia, not
Gabriel García Márquez’s fictional town of Macondo or any other, to
speak of Santander’s and Bolívar’s history of productive and effective
324  R. T. CONN

collaboration, that is to a moment previous to the dispute. We are told

how in 1819 Santander—who has been given supreme command over
the New Granadans by Bolívar—tells Granadan deputies en route to
Angostura who visit him in Casanare—the plains just east of the Andes
on the side projecting toward Venezuela—that there can be no constitu-
tion for the Gran Colombia if representatives of his province are not
present to participate with voice and vote. The crucial procedural mis-
step that was the proclamation of the constitution by the New Granadan
delegate representing Caracas who was also the president of the
Angostura Congress, the highly regarded revolutionary intellectual
Francisco Antonio Zea who had served two years in the Cadíz dungeon
for circulating The Rights of Man, does not fall on deaf ears. After the
deputies inform Bolívar of Santander’s statement upon arriving in
Angostura, Bolívar, we are told, corrects the error in a proclamation he
later makes.39
The Angostura Congress, we know, does finally produce a constitution,
on August 15, 1819, but only for the state of Venezuela. It is a constitu-
tion that is soon abrogated after news of Bolívar’s victory in Boyacá on
August 7 reaches the legislators. The congress issues the Fundamental
Law of the Gran Colombia on December 17, 1819. It resumes in Cúcuta,
New Granada (called Cundinamarca during the Gran Colombia) in
January of 1821.
The moment Bolívar makes this correction is said by Arciniegas to be
the beginning of their friendship.40 In addition to this example of Santander
and Bolívar working together, Arciniegas also tells of how Santander’s
position on constitutional change, one of the issues that triggered the
chain of events beginning in 1826, is no different from Bolívar’s. Hardly
the legalistic individual dissecting and chewing away at laws to bypass
them, as portrayed by his enemies, but rather one who seeks to polish and
perfect them, Santander, Arciniegas tells the reader, is open to change
even though he is adamant about waiting for the Constitutional Congress
of 1831 to reform the 1821 Cúcuta Constitution, as keen as is Bolívar to
make important modifications to that constitution, or to replace it. The
difference between the two is that the Cúcuta-born leader whom Bolívar
had dubbed the Man of Laws, as Arciniegas reminds the reader, observes
and defends legal procedure.41 With all this, Arciniegas is creating a new
story to defeat the portrayal of Santander in García Márquez’s novel—
restoring once again his Bolívar-given moniker to its positive meaning—
and to cover over the history of antagonism between the two in the late
 12  THE BOLÍVAR-SANTANDER POLEMIC IN COLOMBIA: GERMÁN…  325

1820s, monumentalizing for his readers an earlier moment while also,

with regard to their dispute, imagining a reconciliation, as if the dispute
itself represented an origin of sorts of the modern violence in Colombia
and reuniting them could act as a symbolic corrective, much as Lafayette
hoped to do but could not because of Bolívar’s premature death.42
Colombia, like the United States, has a similar story of great men acting
together to establish the conditions of the nation.
Arciniegas thought earlier that he had already delivered the last word
on the topic of Santander and Bolívar, at least in Colombia. In 1988, a
year before the appearance of García Márquez’s novel, he published a
short creative essay on Bolívar’s final journey to the coast, the same topic
as that of the García Márquez novel, presenting Bolívar’s figure as having
no positive ideological value for the construction of the nation.43
In this text, just as in his 1984 book on Bolívar and his 1993 essay on
Santander, the Bolívar of whom he speaks with his signature intimate tone
is made to stand for the old world—identified with the statement he makes
in the late 1820s expressing the view that the only hope for Latin America
is protected status under the British monarchy, a statement whose impor-
tance, as we have seen, David Bushnell minimizes. For this old-time
Liberal warrior for whom the work of Colombia’s Liberal Party in the
1930s and 1940s still represented the promise of Colombia, Bolívar is the
past. Santander is the future representing the American ideology of liberal
democracy.

García Márquez and a New Politics of Sensibility

In turning to The General in His Labyrinth, we will see that the Bolívar-
Santander quarrel is similarly central to García Márquez’s vision. The
novel fictionalizes Bolívar’s exile from Bogotá in May of 1830; his trip
down the Magdalena River, escorted by his small entourage and with a
guard of 100 grenadiers; his extended stay in the towns of Honda,
Mompox, Soledad, and in the city of Cartagena; and his eventual death on
December 17 of that same year in the nearby city of Santa Marta, on the
estate of a Spanish friend, a former royalist. As the narration advances,
with the Liberator’s health increasingly deteriorating, García Márquez
reviews through flashback many of the major acts and episodes of Bolívar’s
life from birth to death. He provides short sketches of the figures who
surrounded Bolívar and of an assortment of individuals, groups, and even
a nonhuman, a dog with whom he is made to come into contact on his
326  R. T. CONN

voyage, all providing the author with an opportunity to position Bolívar in

contemporary debate on issues bearing on the matter of political doctrine,
liberalism, gender, sexual violence, sexual orientation, race, and cultural
and moral openness. This is a novel constructed for a wide public not
necessarily familiar with the independence movement in northern South
America, much less with the Colombian version of that movement with its
stress on the final years of Bolívar’s life in connection to the polemic with
Santander. It is written in the key of romanticism, from the consciousness
of temporality that appears at so many levels of the work to the themes of
love and liberty to romanticism’s interest in subjects marginalized, all
appearing in the text with unrelenting complexity. Interestingly, García
Márquez, in making the values of concern to him speak through Bolívar
and the situations he has him enter, does so from the perspective of the
issues that have been at the heart of debates about his legacy in Colombia
as well as in Venezuela, other Latin American nations, the United States,
and Europe, weaving elements from them into the episodes, conversa-
tions, and straight narrative commentary that make up the novel. In this
process, he makes Bolívar’s figure foundational and instructive even when
at times he presents his behavior as nonexemplary. His Bolívar is an
expelled figure who is prematurely at the end of his life on account of
tuberculosis, his imminent death a source of continuing suspense with his
depleted physical condition never yielding the expected outcome, and
who has been discounted by his contemporaries, just as he was so many
times in his career in moments of defeat.
Some of the issues that have fueled debate, each with its own history,
its own genealogy or tradition as defined by his interpreters, and engaged
by García Márquez, are that Bolívar was a womanizer; that his resigna-
tions from power were not completely sincere; that he was dictatorial;
that, unlike George Washington, he never disbanded his army; that he was
impatient and capricious if not dogmatic; that he executed pardo leaders
Manuel Píar and José Prudencio Padilla for racial reasons; that, as sus-
tained by figures like Marx who point to his never being wounded, he was
unheroic in battle; and that he was profligate, as Peruvian legend would
have it, in his taste for cologne and food. García Márquez’s treatment of
these questions and others is tied to the dispute with Santander that
frames the entire novel. At the beginning, in a sequence that addresses the
culmination of the dispute—the August 27, 1828 dictatorship and the
September 25 attempt on his life by individuals associated with Santander—
we learn that Bolívar summarily executed the 14 accused and came close
 12  THE BOLÍVAR-SANTANDER POLEMIC IN COLOMBIA: GERMÁN…  327

to following through on executing Santander, the alleged intelligence

behind the assassination attempt.
In representing a dispute at the center of national discourse, García
Márquez had an aim quite different from that of David Bushnell. Bushnell
tells us that Bolívar’s last dictatorship was that of a moderate and prag-
matic leader who had the support of the vast majority of the citizens of the
Gran Colombia and who was committed to social reform such as the abo-
lition of slavery. He reminds his readers that two years earlier, in the presi-
dential election of 1826, Bolívar won an overwhelming victory, with
Santander also being reelected vice-president. As for his decision to have
his delegates, outnumbered by Santander’s, walk out of the 1828
Constitutional Convention at Ocaña to prevent a quorum, the event that
set the stage for the final dictatorship, Bushnell sees this act as the legiti-
mate response of a leader who believed that Santander’s constitutionalist
vision was not right for the Union and that his opponent had unfairly
outmaneuvered him by taking advantage of his political machine to elect
more delegates. He does, however, acknowledge Bolívar’s violent and
aggressive attack on Santander’s political party in the wake of the assassi-
nation attempt on September 25, including his expulsion of Santander’s
mistress, Nicolasa Ibañez Arias, from Bogotá, just as he acknowledges
Bolívar’s efforts during his dictatorship to increase the number of dele-
gates that would be elected to the 1830 Constitutional Congress.44
Bushnell, in the course of his career, sought to dispel what he saw as the
overstatement on both sides of the controversy, defending, if you like,
both Santander and Bolívar with his major scholarly contributions. In fact,
in one article, published in Spanish in 1968, Bushnell argues that the two
figures essentially shared the same political and economic positions. As for
Santander’s purported obsession with power, of which he also speaks in
this article, the fact that Santander insisted that Bolívar return to Bogotá
in 1826 rather than take his army to Brazil points to the acting president’s
commitment to Bolívar and his lack of concern about being eclipsed by him.45
García Márquez, in contrast, far from seeking to find common ground
between the two figures, adds new fuel to the conflict as he seeks to coun-
ter the intellectual fuss surrounding preparations for the 150th anniversary
of Santander’s death and the bicentennial of his birth. Incorporating cer-
tain elements of Santander’s legacy as constituted by champions of the
leader in the 1930s and 1940s, he tells us that Santander was the second
most important leader after Bolívar in the independence movement, distin-
guishing himself through his military ­leadership as well as by the legal foun-
328  R. T. CONN

dation he gave to the new republic. But, in the same sentence, García
Márquez also tells us that if Santander is deserving of such national and
continental recognition, he “impressed upon the republic its conservative
and formalistic culture.”46
There are other criticisms of Santander as well, criticisms in a large mea-
sure taken from Liévano Aguirre’s elaboration of the pro-Bolívar tradi-
tion, as pointed out by David Bushnell in a brief review of the novel. In
this review, Bushnell states that García Márquez takes from Liévano
Aguirre without acknowledging that he has done so, leaving him off the
list of individuals from whose work he has drawn. But most importantly
for Bushnell, García Márques does not use the scholarship of “us
Santanderistas” for the purposes of his fictionalized account.47
Just as he has been drawn by Liévano Aguirre and other detractors
throughout the decades, Santander is calculating, cold, legalistic, capable
of cruelty, guilty of permitting his friends to enrich themselves by way of
the loan from the United Kingdom, and most likely, aware of the plot to
assassinate Bolívar, though not necessarily the intelligence behind that
plot, and the victim of an unfair process that had no proof of his culpability.
Nothing is said, however, about Santander’s presidency in the 1830s,
much less about his decision to sentence to death conspirators who sought
to assassinate him. Nor, more importantly, is there mention of his move
away from classical liberalism to protectionism in his presidency, a change
in policy celebrated by Liévano Aguirre in his book on Rafael Núnez
whom he praises for his attempts to steer the nation past the free-market
federalists of his times known as the Radicals and who created the
conditions for there to be a unified Colombia based not only on rights,
but also on duties.48 Thus, with few exceptions, the portrait of Santander
that we are given consists of the iconic stereotypes found in the pro-Bolívar
archive. He is calculating and rationalistic, legalistic to the point of caring
more about procedure and form than about content, and a defender of the
“local privileges of the great families.”49 With regard to the United States,
which figures importantly in the narrative, Santander is presented as not
understanding the threat it poses to continental autonomy, willing as he
was to invite two of its representatives to the Panama Congress.
In contrast to a Santander identified as the founder of a legalistic, capi-
talist system in the service of elites more interested in themselves than the
country—and pictured as he is by Bolívar in his dreams choking on the
reams of paper that define the bureaucratic world he built up—García
Márquez presents Bolívar as an absolute free spirit, constructed through
 12  THE BOLÍVAR-SANTANDER POLEMIC IN COLOMBIA: GERMÁN…  329

the tropes of romanticism, who with all his faults, some extremely signifi-
cant, offers himself as a new foundational myth. We see Bolívar as a vision-
ary, an empty vessel flying no one’s flag but his own; a political thinker
who, understanding the importance of history, a field born in the nine-
teenth century, is suspicious of those from outside Latin America who seek
to judge the region according to the universal criteria of the Enlightenment,
not understanding that it has, as García Márquez insists in much of his
fiction, its own story of becoming to follow, its own temporality indepen-
dent of that of Europe; as a figure who is brilliant and impulsive but who
is also tender and vulnerable; an homme de lettres who is in possession of a
vast culture, with important roots in the classics, but also a connoisseur of
all things local—a person who appreciates and savors the foods and tradi-
tions of Latin America, his prolific use of cologne, for example, the result
of his embrace of a custom among men of the popular classes in Bolivia
rather than of the ways of the Eurocentric upper classes of which he
formed part; and finally, a person who is generous, giving away all his
money and possessions in a process of conscious self-divestment running
counter to the path followed by his former generals who do the opposite,
seizing lands and estates.
As for the political position García Márquez has Bolívar assume in the
Colombian debates of the twentieth century? We are able to glean from
the novel the author’s views with respect to Germán Arciniegas and
Indalecio Liévano Aguirre. In opposition to Arciniegas, before whom he
is resurrecting Bolívar as a figure with ideological positions and sensibili-
ties to guide the Colombian nation in the present, García Márquez asserts
that Bolívar was not a dictator and did not want the protection of the
British monarchy. To the contrary, he never departs from the constitu-
tional tradition, we are told: leader of the Gran Colombia in the capacity
of president, president of Bolivia, and dictator of Peru by virtue of the
congress’s decision to invest that authority in him not once but twice. As
for Liévano Aguirre, we see that García Márquez falls in line with his view,
though not perfectly. Just as Liévano Aguirre does, García Márquez has
Bolívar denounce the Monroe Doctrine when he states that the purpose
of the doctrine is not to help protect the new republics from the Holy
Alliance but rather to contain them in the event that popular governments
emerge in response to forces of reaction. García Márquez’s Bolívar is one
who sees through the United States’ good intentions and the pretense it
makes before the world as a protector.50
330  R. T. CONN

Bolívar’s racial and cultural identity is treated differently, however.

Liévano Aguirre constructs it as Basque, going back to the first Bolívars
and bypassing the history of the Bolívar family in the Americas. García
Márquez, in contrast, speaks of a figure whose great-great grandmother is
a slave of African descent, whose physical features are of mixed stock, and
who is ridiculed by creole Peruvians as a zambo, a term from the colonial
caste system meaning a mixture of African and indigenous ancestry.51 In
the act of memory construction that the novel performs, the Bolívar pre-
sented is, then, a victim of racism himself, hardly the biological bearer of
white or European race and culture with which Liévano Aguirre furnishes
his readers in 1949.
With his victimized and rejected Bolívar in tow, García Márquez uses
the space of the novel to produce a new political and cultural vision of
Bolívar, consumable by a modern citizenry interested in issues concerning
race, gender, sexual orientation, and class relations in a capitalist world
characterized by vast inequality and isolated white elites with their money
parked in the United States and elsewhere, and a Colombian government
allied with the United States. In the first chapter, we are told of some of
the books that accompanied Bolívar in his travels. They include Jean-­
Jacques Rousseau’s Social Contract, which introduced into political
thought the concepts of inequality and power, property defined as the
origin of inequality. Two other major books by Rousseau will appear in the
novel in one scene: his Émile, and La nouvelle Héloïse. We learn that
Bolívar has read his edition of the latter so many times that it is falling
apart. Manuela Sáenz is reading Émile, which Bolívar dislikes, for the
tenth time—the two reading across gender lines.52
As they always are for him, literature and the humanities, the space in
which he conceives of and carries out his political interventions, constitute
a site of resistance, the tools through which a civic body and culture can
be discovered and affirmed in opposition to the visions promoted by law-
yers, engineers, and diplomats. García Márquez’s Bolívar, for this reason,
could not be more literary. Miguel de Cervantes provides the foundation
of a narrative structure that is episodic, reminiscent of that of Cervantes’s
El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha (Don Quijote, Part 1 1605;
Part 2 1615) with each stop along Bolívar’s trip leading to a new excursion
into his past in dialogue with those he encounters.53 García Márquez play-
fully uses these moments, constructed through the literary technique of
bathos, which privileges the ridiculous and trivial, to constitute all the
values that will go into his iteration of Bolívar, including the characteristics
 12  THE BOLÍVAR-SANTANDER POLEMIC IN COLOMBIA: GERMÁN…  331

we have already seen, as well as to raise up other subjectivities, all part of

García Márquez’s democratic politics that affirms the idea of a plural soci-
ety, a new instance of, perhaps, the wider social community Rousseau’s
Émile comes to know. Bolívar enters into contact with those subjectivities
though unlike Émile he doesn’t learn, remaining the same. To construct
his narrative, García Márquez furnishes readers with a series of inventories,
all reflecting the contents of what is there in the controversial story of a life
and of independence. The narrative ruse is that nothing is being produced
or interpreted, only cataloged. A scene at the beginning of the novel in
which Bolívar and his servant José Palacios open a chest belonging to
Bolívar to discover an exhaustive list of its contents—utensils, plates, and
glasses and tablecloths detailed according to kind and quantity54—is the
degree zero of that narrative strategy. At his different stops, Bolívar will
use them when he can, though in one instance he will not, borrowing
those of his hosts, after which he will learn that they have buried their
dishware and utensils, fearful of contracting tuberculosis from their emi-
nent but contagious guest. But this is just one of the many inventories that
García Márquez constructs as he engages Bolívar on the topics of concern
to him, most derived from the debates that have swirled around his figure.
The first topic is Bolívar the womanizer. Interpreters have approached
it with different purposes, either condemning Bolívar, explaining away or
minimizing his relationships, or simply acknowledging them, all this
within the different hermeneutic systems they create. García Márquez
chooses a cross of the first and third of these options, giving his readers a
libidinal Bolívar who will stop at nothing to pursue romantic conquest.
His reputation precedes him both then and now. In one scene in which a
character invented by García Márquez, an English woman by the name of
Miranda Lindsay who seeks out Bolívar in Honda—Bolívar having disem-
barked there from his flotilla of sampans—we learn of the women who
have saved his life at the same time that we see Bolívar in his much-dis-
cussed subject position as lothario.55 Miranda comes to Bolívar to appeal
to the only person who can save her husband from the law, jailed for kill-
ing in a duel a man with whom she had been having an affair. Bolívar
wants to repay her, as he credits Miranda Lindsay with having saved his life
on a fateful night in 1815 in Kingston, Jamaica, a fact of which we are not
informed until the flashback her appearance prompts unfolds.56
As the story goes, Miranda Lindsay, on that fateful night, arranges a
late-night tryst with Bolívar for a reason of which Bolívar is unaware. In
following his impulse, Bolívar, pleased at the prospect of such a willing
332  R. T. CONN

conquest, throws caution to the wind, García Márquez tells us, exposing
himself to danger at a moment in which he is being pursued by assassins
and when he is the only hope for Latin American independence, an act of
indiscretion on his part that he purportedly repeats during the course of
independence, each one given as if in an inventory, and which his enemies
use to their advantage to discredit him. But Miranda Lindsay, we learn, has
arranged the rendezvous not because she has a romantic interest in Bolívar
but because she has found out about a plot to kill him in his quarters that
night and wishes to intercede, political supporter that she is of the inde-
pendence movement. The next morning Bolívar returns to his lodgings,
and if he has not understood why his advances had been resisted all night
long by Lindsay, he does now, finding in his hammock, fiction now giving
way to the legendary facts of history,57 the body of the friend who had
fallen asleep there while awaiting his return, mistaken for Bolívar and
stabbed to death.58 García Márquez, with all kinds of ironic implications,
has created a romantic interlude to explain Bolívar’s well-known, unex-
plained fortuitous absence from his quarters in Jamaica the night of the
assassination attempt in 1815.
The cultural work he accomplishes in recreating this moment in
Bolívar’s life story and Latin American independence is important. In
addition to tenderly mocking Bolívar, he celebrates the act of liberality of
spirit of his fictional Miranda Lindsay while he creates a female counter-
part to the male seducer that Bolívar is, though, arguably, an exact equiva-
lent among women is difficult if not impossible to establish, the male
seducer taking lovers in a serial fashion in the way Bolívar does and the
female—some might say—moving through her lovers according to a logic
based on something other than conquest and discarding. But there is
other critical work that García Márquez carries out in relation to the fic-
tionalized encounter with the future adulterous Miranda Lindsay in
Jamaica. He tells his readers of what will become known as the Jamaica
Letter, explaining that the words uttered by Bolívar at the dinner where he
first meets Lindsay would find their way into the letter written soon after.
The words he describes and that are made to represent the document are
from Bolívar’s statement in the letter about Latin America representing a
small species of humanity.59 Nothing, then, is communicated about the
role of the letter in attempting to appeal to the British much less anything
about Bolívar’s Enlightenment-based ideas of government, or his repre-
sentation of himself in 1815 as leader of a divided creole class. Bolívar
comes out of the fictional scene standing alone politically. As for his s­ ubject
 12  THE BOLÍVAR-SANTANDER POLEMIC IN COLOMBIA: GERMÁN…  333

position as a creole, a person of Spanish descent born in the colonies,

García Márquez, as he does throughout the novel, presents Bolívar using
language other than creole, describing him as a member of Venezuela’s
elite economic class while diverting the reader’s attention to another
meaning of creole, this one signifying what is local or national. Bolívar is
an intelligent and discerning figure who appreciates all food dishes and
things creole.
García Márquez has given us three acts of intercession—the first the
one requested of Bolívar by Miranda Lindsay, the second the one she
herself performs in 1815, and the third that of Bolívar’s unwitting friend.
When it comes to women interceding for Bolívar, the most famous
moment is that of the night of September 25, 1828, so important in
Colombian historiography and one to which the novel returns repeatedly.
We refer to the scene where Bolívar’s Ecuadorian lover and companion
Manuela Sáenz aids him in his escape from would-be assassins, earning the
title of la Libertadora del Libertador. In García Márquez’s rendering of
the scene, which is close to the standard one, Simón is in bed with Manuela,
completely naked, as he often is in the novel, and confident of his own
safety, having continually disregarded warnings from her about an
assassination plot, as he was now once again, when conspirators storm the
Palace of the Government in Bogotá. If Sáenz has Bolívar dress and leap
from the balcony to save himself while she delays the conspirators,
camouflaging the smell of his cologne with swirls of cigar smoke, the
narrative thread that García Márquez wishes to establish is that of a Bolívar
who, as this assassination attempt and the one in 1815 show, is all too
willing to pursue his own pleasures at the risk of his glory, a man attached
to his private pleasures and constantly at risk of being undone by them.
Ironically, though, it is his decision to leave his quarters to see this fictional
figure, Miranda Lindsay in 1815 that saves him. García Márquez is using
Bolívar’s sexual desire to his advantage, having it represent his private,
authentic self in what at times could seem a modern sentimental novel.
But he is doing so with the explicit goal of constructing the women he
comes in contact with in a new way. With Bolívar’s womanizing, sometimes
revealed to be nothing but sexual prowling, providing entrée into the real
and invented lives he explores, García Márquez tells of strong and complex
women, some already part of the historical record such as Manuela Sáenz,
334  R. T. CONN

others from lower social classes, still others who are slaves. In later pages,
he returns to Sáenz, memorializing her for the courage she shows the
different times she burns an effigy of Santander to mock the elites who
have tried to kill Bolívar and who later drive her out.
The second topic we address centers on Bolívar in his association with
violence, an iteration of his figure rooted in his War to the Death of
1813–1814 but that Lynch and others extend to October 11, 1819, to
include Santander’s execution of 38 Spanish officials taken prisoner the
moment of the August 7 Boyacá victory. As we have seen, the War to the
Death has been used in a variety of ways for the purpose of making narrative.
García Márquez refers to the 1813–1814 years and he uses the War to the
Death as a metaphor, describing Bolívar’s battle with Santander as a “war to
the death.” Violence of different kinds runs through the novel and Bolívar’s
character. But in a manner not unlike that of the Venezuelan Larrazábal,
García Márquez also shows Bolívar to be tender through, among other nar-
rative threads, the story line he constructs around his relationship to canines.
This particular thread is ridiculous, and it is meant to be. The scene
starts with a mangy dog jumping onto Bolívar’s sampan as it departs from
shore. In what is a scene of violence, the dog is mauled by Bolívar’s two
dogs, but then, in an abrupt reversal of what has transpired, kept alive and
nursed back to health. The fate of the dog is determined pages later at the
end of the chapter with Bolívar dramatically naming the recovered dog
after himself. Thus, we learn of Bolívar’s love for dogs and their place in
the epic of independence. Of course, there is the immediate identification
between the body of Bolívar and that of sickly dog, both defying fate. But
the topic hardly comes to an end with the concluding lines of the chapter,
as the matter of Bolívar’s canine affection continues to be explored in
subsequent chapters. In a scene in Cartagena in which the former
Bolivarian general and once rival, Mariano Montilla—now commander of
the departments of Magdalena and Zulia and the isthmus of Panama—has
made the decision to poison all the street dogs to prevent an outbreak of
rabies, Bolívar reacts, telling his dear friend, of whose military feats on the
northern coast García Márquez informs the reader, that he must rescind it
for the reason that such an act is an assault on his moral values. Bolívar is
contagious like the dogs, which could be the reason he is so sympathetic,
but the powerful sentiment expressed in this scene by Bolívar for dogs, all
dogs, prompts yet another inventory, this one detailing the ones that he
and José Palacios adopted during their expeditions and which accompanied
them in their battles and tribulations.
 12  THE BOLÍVAR-SANTANDER POLEMIC IN COLOMBIA: GERMÁN…  335

García Márquez’s inventory includes Nevado, declared the hero of the

early battles of Carabobo because he took out an entire brigade of royalist
dogs unassisted. We are also told of the two bloodhounds who stood
guard at the Government Palace the night of the assassination attempt of
September 25, 1828, the first to fall with their throats cut. Finally, we are
informed that Bolívar assigned all his dogs a different name so that he
could feel each of their deaths, refusing to repeat names after losing them.
Ever the romantic, García Márquez’s Bolívar insists on seeing what is indi-
vidual, on a form of suffering that is rooted in what is not abstract, what is
purportedly authentic.60 As may well be the author’s intention, this intense
feeling is to be understood as a form of compensation for the necessity in
war of not feeling human death. We see both the unfeeling warrior for
whom violence is routine and the human being who values all lives, in this
case those of dogs.
The third topic we address has to do with the matter of Bolívar’s rela-
tionship to race and racial hegemony. Indeed, race informs the novel in
complex ways, although, as with all the controversial subject matter on
which the critical axes of the novel turn, García Márquez offers irony,
contradiction, and ambiguity. It is no small significance that García
Márquez should feature the character of José Palacios, the black servant of
Bolívar whose loyalty to his “master” is unequaled by anyone else in his
circle, who dresses impeccably, and who is sometimes taken for the
Liberator, their complexions similar, as the most important character in
the novel after Bolívar. Palacios is freed upon his death and like Bolívar
dies impoverished, the ultimate privilege in a novel that speaks from
Bolívar’ status as an expelled, marginalized figure. Palacios who is described
as illiterate but as having a prodigious memory provides García Márquez
with the opportunity to name and celebrate oral culture. As if taking his
cue from Rousseau, Palacios states to Bolívar that not learning to read and
write was a conscious decision, literacy for him a form of social pretention,
born, we might say, of the institution of property, including slave property.
Other relationships of his with individuals of African descent are also
explored, including his friendship with a subordinate, a pardo Venezuelan
lieutenant with whom he dances at a ball after seeing him rebuffed by a
white aristocratic woman and whom he marries to one of his nieces.61 This
marriage does occur in real life. We are also reminded of his proclamations
urging the manumission of slaves, made subsequent to his pledge
to Pétion, proclamations monumentalized in the Angostura Address
that have dominated the historical record, as well as many others made
336  R. T. CONN

throughout his career to different ends. In them, Bolívar declares manu-

mission to be a precondition for a republican state defined by equality
while characterizing Latin Americans as a mix of peoples from America,
Africa, and Europe.
But García Márquez also provides evidence countering the notion that
Bolívar’s understanding of human relations was unprejudiced. In particu-
lar, the text takes up the matter of Bolívar’s repression of the pardo politi-
cal movement in connection to his decision to sentence to death and
execute pardo independence leaders General Manuel Píar in 1817 and
Admiral Prudencio Padilla in 1828, both heroes. The first case has a
haunting presence in the novel. When Bolívar arrives in the course of his
voyage at a town square he is reminded of the place where his soldiers car-
ried out his order to execute Píar. Píar had done much to help Bolívar
achieve victory in the Spanish town of Angostura; but he directly challenged
Bolívar’s authority as supreme commander and was thought by pro-­
Bolívar leaders to be organizing the pardo population.62 As if responding
to his own conscience and to the judgment of his accusers from the time
and through the decades of the polemic that ensued after his death, Bolívar
says, in what is the last line of the chapter, “I would do it again.”63
In a novel that plays on opposites, with binaries taking on an oxymo-
ronic quality, gratitude and ingratitude—a fourth topic García Márquez
considers—become perversely interchangeable. Bolívar, who characterizes
any person or political entity who opposes him as ungrateful, ironically
shows himself not only to be just that, ungrateful, when public opinion
might think he should be the opposite, but also to be punitive. There are
many examples of this, starting with Píar, but also including Padilla who
secured the northern Granadan coast at a crucial moment in the indepen-
dence struggle. According to some, notably historian Aline Helg, Padilla
had sought to be loyal to both Bolívar and Santander as the rift between
the two widened but whom Bolívar ultimately perceived as a threat because
of the wide following he had in the Cartagena pardo community. That
Padilla was accused of leading a race war in Cartagena after the Ocaña
Convention where he had been an elector, jailed in Bogotá, and then sum-
marily executed in the days following the September 25, 1828 assassina-
tion attempt, having in the political confusion of the state crisis been freed
by conspirators from jail and then after three days turning himself in, is
seen by Helg as a clear example of Bolívar’s racist, double-standard
politics.64
 12  THE BOLÍVAR-SANTANDER POLEMIC IN COLOMBIA: GERMÁN…  337

García Márquez, however, presents the execution of Padilla, the second

instance in which Bolívar put to death a star general who was pardo, as an
act that only had the appearance of being problematic. García Márquez
seems unconcerned that Bolívar showed absolute mercy to others guilty of
far more serious acts, white leaders such as Páez, for example, who led the
rebellion against the Gran Colombia, or Santander, the reputed intelli-
gence behind the assassination attempt to whom he granted a pardon.
García Márquez, to give an institutional dimension to Bolívar’s judgment,
tells the reader that with regard to the earlier execution of Píar the jury
that made the recommendation to Bolívar consisted of generals who were
friends of Píar.65 Is Bolívar targeting pardo leaders any more than others
who would defy him or who were associated with his nemesis Santander?
García Márquez is telling us that he is not. Bolívar is simply a victim of
circumstance, just as historian Rodríguez O. and others have maintained.
Additionally, in another example of García Márquez’s interest in the
topic of gratitude and ingratitude, also in relationship to race, we are told
in what is a long list of Bolívar’s contradictions, ones of which Bolívar is
said to be aware, that he excluded Haiti from the Congreso de Panamá, this
after Pétion, as we know, aided Bolívar in a crucial moment, thereby making
it possible for Bolívar to return to the theater of war to oppose Fernando
VII’s counter-revolution. There could perhaps be no greater act of
ingratitude on Bolívar’s part than this, though we are told that in regard to
his stance on abolition he has honored his debt to Pétion. We also see him
make good on his debt to the fictional Miranda Lindsay, asking Mariano
Montilla to do what he can to pardon her husband. If Bolívar, though, is
guilty of ingratitude toward others, others are shown to be guilty of the
same toward him. At the beginning of the novel, we see him shouted out
of Bogotá by the assembled masses that offer no acknowledgment of his
acts, expressing, to the contrary, only rage over the 1828 executions of his
would-be assassins and his continued presence in Bogotá.
García Márquez brings the themes of ingratitude, race, gender, and
Bolívar’s womanizing together in a moment in Venezuela in 1820, one
that Bolívar is given to remembering when feeling defeated. There is much
that could make certain readers skip over the reality of what happens in the
moment described, but here are the facts: Bolívar, who has been given
lodging by an old friend together with his aides-de-camp and his army,
rapes a young woman named María Luisa, his host’s slave.
García Márquez tells the reader that María Luisa neither desires Bolívar
nor possesses affection for him and that she is fearful when, after being
338  R. T. CONN

held so tight she cannot move, he carries her off to his hammock. He adds
that she is a virgin. But the following morning, Bolívar, not seeing what he
has done as a rape and assuming she has sexual desire for him and romantic
feeling, purchases María Luisa’s freedom from her master when she tells
him that she is a slave. Love has freed you, he proclaims, unconscious of
the fact that applying such a category of affection to her is obscene.
Departing, Bolívar invites María Luisa whom he has jestfully nicknamed
Queen María Luisa, after the wife of Carlos IV and the mother of Fernando
VII, to go with him. What woman would not want to leave her life behind
to be with Bolívar, he could think? Still, García Márquez, in constructing
María Luisa as a violated, completely unwilling conquest, creates a twist
that reinforces the young woman’s agency and the conditions under which
Bolívar’s act has taken place while also eliciting male laughter, enough
perhaps to make some readers think that what has occurred is fine or to
pay no attention to the encounter. To the amusement of the men on
Bolívar’s staff and also to José Antonio Páez who has arrived the night
before, María Luisa says no to Bolívar, choosing of her own free will to
stay behind rather than go with her would-be liberator, the moniker in its
application here purposely included to underline the incongruence. The
master returns the 100 pesos to Bolívar, telling him to use it for the war
cause, but honors María Luisa’s new liberated status. This is the story of
men of power negotiating the legal status of a woman’s body. Páez jokes
that rejection is the fate of the liberators.66
The freedom they are achieving for the people is not appreciated. But
the main point after the fact of the rape—María Luisa’s virginity violently
taken from her—is that blindness and forgetting will prevail. Bolívar will
remember his encounter with María Luisa according to the military logic
of triumph and defeat. We are told that whenever he loses in battle, he is
thrust back to that day, one in a string of memories of defeat, whether
military or involving women, flooding his mind. The particular memory is
not of a rape but of a failed amorous conquest. Indeed, García Márquez
has created for the reader one more episode—this one all too disturbing—
in the counter-narrative he is constructing—of women who to Bolívar’s
surprise reject him. They too, like so many of the subjects García Márquez
treats in the novel, form an inventory; this one a new rendering of Bolívar’s
conquests given from multiple points of view.
In García Márquez’s discussion of race and racial hegemony, we also
see Bolívar, as noted at the beginning of our discussion of the novel in
connection to the racism of which he was victim in Peru, from the per-
spective of his racial heritage. The scene that prompts the exploration is
 12  THE BOLÍVAR-SANTANDER POLEMIC IN COLOMBIA: GERMÁN…  339

Bolívar gifting Gran Colombia coinage with his image to two of his for-
mer generals, the image on that coinage a ­misrepresentation, we are told,
of his physical appearance. Producing an inventory of the portraits made
of his figure, García Márquez seeks to settle the matter of Bolívar’s physi-
cal appearance, telling us that later depictions got his African heritage
wrong, departing from earlier renderings of his figure by portraitists in
Madrid and Haiti who simply saw what they saw, representing his
Caribbean features. Later artists feel compelled to “whiten” or Europeanize
Bolívar according to the Roman model that to their minds befitted a
leader of his stature.67 Bolívar is multiracial, a vision that is different from
that of Liévano Aguirre but similar to the vision provided by Lynch in his
history of 1973.
Lynch, as we have said, does something of an about-­face in his 2006
biography, stating that Bolívar’s family was always considered white. With
a different portrait of Bolívar in mind, the one that he says is considered
to be the classic rendering portraying Bolívar as dark, he goes in a direction
opposite from García Márquez. Against the portrait in question, Lynch
places on the book cover one showing Bolívar to be white with an aquiline
nose, whiteness upending the received notion of darkness. This is a
“miniature on ivory of 1828, after a painting by Roulin.”68 Bolívar’s dark
skin, reported on by O’Leary at the end of his life, represents a change, he
states, one that is owing to the reality that, by the end of his life, it was
severely weathered, the result of being brutally exposed to the harsh
elements of the regions through which he traveled on horseback.69
Lynch, though he also speaks of whiteness as socially constructed, has
opted for the default position of whiteness. For his part, García Márquez,
writing 16  years after Lynch’s first work, perhaps inspired by it, and
17 years before his second, underlines Bolívar’s facial features differently,
arguing that in the space of artistic representation they go from something
approaching what he in fact looked like to something fictional, the result
of social and institutional prejudices. The Bolívar who enters the
Colombian and Latin American imaginary is in this way a white,
Europeanized figure appealing to the creole elites. The 1828 miniature
on ivory that is on Lynch’s 2006 book cover is part of that process of
whitening.
If García Márquez performs the act of recovery of Bolívar’s racial iden-
tity from portraiture to speak of the connections between race, representa-
tion, and institutions, thereby distancing his figure from the white creole
regime that he in fact stood for, he also presents Bolívar as a vulnerable soul
constitutionally unable to defend himself against the calumny that is part of
340  R. T. CONN

politics. The Bolívar who is attacked during his own time becomes an
opportunity for García Márquez to continue to explore his sentimental
side, in this case, his paradoxical vulnerability. “He was so sensitive,” writes
García Márquez, “to everything said about him, true or false, that he never
recovered from any falsehood, and until the moment of his death he
struggled to disprove them.”70
García Márquez is exploring matters concerning injury to Bolívar’s
public persona, and not only those related to statements made by
Santander. In an interesting twist on the idea of Bolívar as a victim of cal-
umny, García Márquez also tells us that Bolívar was unwilling to behave in
such a manner as “to protect himself from lies. As he had on other occa-
sions, the last time he was in Mompox he gambled his glory for the sake
of a woman.”71
Do we sympathize with Bolívar, as Felipe Larrazábal would have us do?
Or do we regard him also as foolish?
A fifth topic, one which García Márquez is among the first to consti-
tute, and which turns, as other topics do, on sensibility, openness, and
intercession, has to do with sexual orientation. In the scene in question,
we see Bolívar and his retinue rescue a shipwrecked German from an islet.
The sequence revolves around another important legacy related to Bolívar,
that of the German naturalist and explorer of Latin America Alexandre
Humboldt who was thought to be gay. García Márquez has the rescued
German blurt out an antigay statement about Humboldt, much admired
in Latin America and a personage that according to lore Bolívar met at a
salon in Paris in 1804.72 In reaction, Bolívar promptly has him removed
from the sampan, though later he arranges for the wayward European to
be picked up by a mail vessel. Bolívar is not able to abide such intolerance,
saying later that he “isn’t worth a single hair on Humboldt’s head.”73 In
this way, García Márquez has his hapless womanizer become a defender of
gay subjectivity. And what better way to do it than through Humboldt,
one of the major figures in Latin American letters who is commonly paired
with Bolívar in the same way Rousseau and Montesquieu are.
García Márquez has created a tapestry that permits the reader to see
Bolívar’s figure in the light of all the major issues concerning modernity
that are important to the author, including gay subjectivity, gender, race,
social class, capitalism, and US/Latin American relations. García Márquez’s
Bolívar is nothing like that of the Colombian Bolívar Society with its white
elite that uses his figure to manage the social sphere, nor, then, anything
 12  THE BOLÍVAR-SANTANDER POLEMIC IN COLOMBIA: GERMÁN…  341

like the Bolívar critiqued by those behind the state-sanctioned Santander

revival of the late 1980s. Alluding to Santander’s correspondence, said to
have been produced such as to protect his image for posterity, and also to
Bolívar’s, said to have been produced in the exact opposite way, without
concern for future audiences, García Márquez has Bolívar in his night-
mares dream of Santander choking on his own letters, an apt image that
not only reveals Bolívar’s unhealthy obsession with his former ally, but also
a social regime that, as Angel Rama would say, anchors its legitimacy in the
written word, the order of texts substituting for democratic and legal pro-
cess. But Bolívar, who does not understand why Joaquín Mosquera, the
victim of Urdaneta’s coup, does not go to visit him on his way out of the
country, has, as we have seen, his own blind spots.74
Righteousness and vanity prevent Bolívar from giving up on the Gran
Colombia, but also from understanding others, in this case Mosquera who
despises him for his support of Urdaneta or at the very least for doing
nothing to aid the new government. Bolívar’s legacy is also violent parti-
san politics, both of others’ making and of his own. He stands ever so
imperfectly against Santander, his own person a space in which to discover
political and social lessons. García Márquez has created for the reader a
new version of Rousseau’s Émile. But it is not Bolívar who is Émile.
Rather, it is the reader, who, in following Bolívar, learns about inequality
and power, seeing what Bolívar sees and what he does not see, starting
with, in regard to the latter, the fact that Bolívar is a male transgressor
whose love life is also one of sexual exploitation. In the moment of
Bolívar’s death, the reader both feels Bolívar’s passing and the web of
social relations in which that death takes place, with slaves who are oblivi-
ous to the great leader’s end singing in the background, and the local
people of Santa Marta taking up a collection to pay for Bolívar’s coffin.
Bolívar’s generosity is not unmatched. The community is also generous.
García Márquez is preparing the reader for a socially engaged life of
caring across the lines of race, social class, gender, sexual orientation, and
political party. Performing with this novel the same ethical function that
he does in all his fiction, he places Bolívar in and against a social reality that
transcends him. In this way, he approaches his figure in a manner not
unlike the Cuban José Martí of the 1893 speech we discussed in Chap. 4.
In that address, Martí presents Latin America’s mestizo and indigenous
leaders who have been brutally executed by the Spanish parading before a
Bolívar who in his political sensibilities is a mantuano. The issue is citizen-
342  R. T. CONN

ship. Martí’s Bolívar is unprepared to represent the masses who are unlike
him. García Márquez’s Bolívar is different. The novelist endows Bolívar
with an African-descended racial genealogy, a set of political sensibilities,
and a cultural palate, all three that distance him from his social class.
Culturally, he is a figure of Colombia, of Latin America, not of Europe.
We see Bolívar speaking of overcoming inequalities, moved by his reading
of Rousseau. But we also see him as a figure who not only falls short of
understanding social relations but who also embodies forces of power and
inequality.

The Santander-Bolívar polemic has continued into the twenty-first cen-

tury. In 2001, Germán Riaño Cano published El gran calumniado: réplica
a la leyenda negra de Santander (The Great Calumniated One: Reply to the
Black Legend of Santander), a work in which he presents Santander as an
extraordinary administrator and legislator who is always true to his moral
principles.75 A year later, director Jorge Alí Triana brought out Bolívar soy
yo (Bolívar Is Me), a comedic film about Colombia’s militarized state at the
turn of the twenty-first century.76 We conclude our discussion with this
film, which engages with Bolívar in the context of his final years and in
particular his death, just as the other Colombian works we have examined
do, and also in the context of his relationship to Santander.
The film is about a fictional Colombian soap opera called Las amantes
de Bolívar (The Lovers of Bolívar) that has become a national hit. In an
allusion to Bolívar’s death-bed joke in which he places himself in the
company of Jesus and don Quijote as history’s third great majadero or
fool, Triana creates a modern-day Christ-like, quixotic figure. In the
moment the actor who plays Bolívar in the series, Santiago Miranda, is to
appear in front of a firing squad in the soap opera, he refuses to perform his
assigned role, stating that Bolívar does not die in this manner. The producer
and director of the soap opera have made the decision that to preserve the
series high ratings, they cannot have Bolívar die in bed, as he in fact did, as
this would not be of interest to viewers. Miranda is refusing to allow Bolívar
to die in this manner, and himself to be fired. He is like Cervantes’s Quijote
of Part II who takes exception with the acts of his fictional character as
represented by a competitor of Cervantes in a pirated sequel. Santiago
Miranda declares that he will accept none of the old or current scripts for
his character, insisting on a new story that will result in success rather than
failure—success being the resuscitation of the Gran Colombia and recon-
ciliation of Bolívar and his archrival Santander.
 12  THE BOLÍVAR-SANTANDER POLEMIC IN COLOMBIA: GERMÁN…  343

As the film approaches its climax, the actor, whom we have seen per-
forming the role of state symbol in Bogotá’s Plaza Bolívar, surrounded by
a US-financed modern army, will take a position on the ethical claims of
both the Right and the Left in Colombia. The all-important moment is a
summit meeting of the presidents of the Bolivarian republics at Santa
Marta to which he has been invited by the Colombian president and
whose advisors have supplied him with a prepared text to perform as if he
were the real Bolívar. Going off script, Miranda denounces all the heads of
state for not living up to their responsibilities. The MPs seek to seize and
remove him from the event. In a scene subsequent to this, we see Miranda
going upstream in a boat on the lower Magdalena River, fleeing the mili-
tary and accompanied by the Colombian president, whom, to avoid arrest,
he has taken hostage. Suddenly, a group of Ejército Popular Revolucionario
(EPR) (Revolutionary Popular Army) guerrilla soldiers appear to board
the boat. Like the townspeople at the river ports who shout out their
approval for Miranda/Bolívar, they treat the actor as if he were the real
Bolívar, interested both in his hostage and in taking advantage of a nation’s
symbol, now incarnated by Miranda in his role in the immensely popular
soap opera; in fact, a woman guerrilla leader is also a loyal viewer, knowing
all the names of Bolívar’s lovers. The guerrillas go on to ceremoniously
present the delusional Bolívar with the old sword of the real Bolívar, which
in 1974 had been taken by the guerilla group M-19 from the Quinta de
Bolívar (the Country House of Bolívar), a residence used by Bolívar in
Bogotá that is now a museum. The actor responds angrily, asking why he
would need a sword and censuring them for using violence, standing in
this way against the iteration of his figure guerrilla groups had appropriated:
that of the Bolívar of the War to the Death.
In the final scene, in which Santiago Miranda and the guerrilla forces
have stormed the Quinta Bolívar in Bogotá, he will make the final change
to the Bolívar script. The scene shows the actor telling the president, who
through the gaze of Miranda we see momentarily transformed into
Santander, that he forgives him for the assassination attempt on his life.
What this imagined rewriting of history means, however, is not immedi-
ately clear, as soldiers begin to fire on the building after hearing a shot
from the compound, an act clearly hearkening back to the Colombian
government’s decision in 1985 to take the Palacio de la Justicia (the Palace
of Justice) without concern for the lives of the Supreme Court justices
being held hostage by M-19, the others inside, or the contents of the
building, including the court’s archives, all incinerated as a result of the
344  R. T. CONN

tank assault, and all of which we are reminded of by a reporter on location

in front of the besieged quinta.
With the final images of destruction in the film, actual clips taken from
Colombian newsreels, including footage of the assault on the palacio
sutured to the culminating scene showing a dead Alejandra Barberini, the
actress who in the telenovela plays opposite Miranda as Manuela Sáenz and
who had gone to him earlier in the hopes of saving him from certain
death; a deceased president whom we are to see as Santander, killed at the
hands of the Colombian army; and a Miranda on his last gasps; it would
seem that the symbolic reconciliation of Bolívar and Santander imagined
in Miranda’s new script has failed. The cycle of violence is not broken but
repeated. The film ends with Miranda shouting “Corte, Corte!” (“Cut!
Cut!”), expressing with this a desire to do the final scene over again, he
and the others having continued the violence of the past.

Notes
1. Frank Safford and Marco Palacios, Colombia: Fragmented Land, Divided
Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 116–117.
2. Ibid., 119–123.
3. Ibid., 122–123.
4. David Bushnell, “Voter Participation in the Colombian Election of 1856,”
The Hispanic American Historical Review 51, no. 2 (1971): 237–249.
5. Miguel Antonio Caro, “Mensaje Presidencial al Congreso de 1898,” in
Obra selecta, Ed. Carlos Valderrama Andrade (Caracas: Biblioteca
Ayacucho, 1993), 261.
6. Ibid., “La conquista,” 201.
7. For a discussion of the cultural and literary work produced by Caro and
others in the context of their positivist project, see José María Rodríguez
García, The City of Translation: Poetry and Ideology in Nineteenth-Century
Colombia (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
8. Proyecto de Ley por la cual se conmemora el primer centenario de la muerte
del general Santander/República de Colombia (Bogotá: Imprenta Nacional,
1937), 3–5. I am translating parts of an Article of the Act on page 5: “Las
dos cámaras, reunidas en Congreso, celebrarán una sesión el 6 de mayo de
1940, en el mismo edificio en donde se instaló el Congreso Constituyente
de 1821. En esta reunión solemne se leerá el Acta primera del Congreso de
Cúcuta y el discurso que pronunció Santander al tomar posesión del cargo
de Vicepresidente de la Gran Colombia.”
 12  THE BOLÍVAR-SANTANDER POLEMIC IN COLOMBIA: GERMÁN…  345

9. José Hernández Carillo, 1940, Santander y la Gran Colombia (Bogotá:

Editorial A B C).
10. See in Gabriel René-Moreno, 1917, Ayacucho en Buenos Aires y prevari-
cación de Rivadavia (Madrid: Editorial-América, Biblioteca de la juventud
hispano-americana Series, 7), 17. “Semejante a H. Taine, á quien el ‘dato’
impedía valerse de toda la luz de su criterio, haciéndole poner empeño
especial en demoler reputaciones consagradas, D.  Gabriel René-Moreno
‘no llega á ver en los documentos sino lo que convenga a la idea preconce-
bida,’ según expresión de Laureano Vallenilla Lanz, dirigida al historiador
Carlos Villanueva. Para el severo Taine, en Bonaparte sólo debe verse un
gran egoísta, y en los revolucionarios del 89 unos bandidos. En concepto
de Moreno, Bolívar es un ‘falaz,’ un ‘autocrata’ y un ‘delincuente.’ Es
cierto que Taine tenía sus admiraciones, Enrique Beyle, por ejemplo.”
“Like H. Taine, whose interest in the ‘detail’ prevented him from taking
full advantage of his criteria, leading him to insist on demolishing enshrined
reputations, D. Gabriel Moreno ‘is only able to see in the documents that
which is in the interest of his preconceived idea,’ to borrow from Laureano
Vallenilla Lanz who critiqued the historian Carlos Villanueva on these
grounds. For the severe Taine, one should regard Bonaparte only as a great
egoist, and the revolutionaries of ’89 as bandits. According to Moreno,
Bolívar is a ‘fake,’ an ‘autocrat’ and a ‘delinquent.’ It is true that Taine had
his special considerations, Enrique Beyle, for example.”
11. Milton Puentes, Breve historia del partido liberal colombiano (Bogotá:
Editorial Prag 1961).
12. Milton Puentes, Grandes hombres de Colombia (Bogotá: no publisher avail-
able, 1962).
13. Centenario de la muerte del Libertador Simón Bolívar: Acuerdo de la
Conferencia Episcopal de 1930. Bogotá. Accessed on November 2018.
https://www.cec.org.co/sites/default/files/WEB_CEC/Documentos/
Documentos-Historicos/1930%20Centenario%20de%20la%20
muerte%20del%20Libertador.pdf.
14. Proceso seguido al general Santander: por consecuencia del acontecimiento de
la noche del 25 de septiembre de 1828 en Bogotá, Ed. Germán Mejía Pavony
(Bogotá: Biblioteca de la presidencia de la República, Administración
Virgilio Barco, 1988).
15. Germán Arciniegas, Bolívar y la revolución (Bogotá: Planeta Colombiana
Editorial S. A., 1984).
16. Gabriel García Márquez, Trans Edith Grossman, The General in His
Labyrinth (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990).
17. Gabriel García Márquez, Trans. Gregory Rabassa, The Autumn of the
Patriarch (New York: Harper and Row, 1976).
346  R. T. CONN

18. Germán Arciniegas, Trans. Mildred Adams, The Knight of El Dorado, the
tale of Don Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada and his conquest of New Granada,
now called Colombia (New York: The Viking Press, 1942).
19. Germán Arciniegas, Trans. Angel Flores, Germans in the Conquest of
America; A sixteenth century venture (New York: Hafner Pub Co., 1943).
20. Germán Arciniegas, Trans. Harriet de Onís, The Green Continent, a com-
prehensive view of Latin America by its leading writers (New York: Alfred
A. Knopf, 1944).
21. Germán Arciniegas, Trans. Harriet de Onís, Caribbean Sea of the New
World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1946).
22. Germán Arciniegas, Trans. Harriet de Onís, The State of Latin America
(New York: Alfred A.  Knopf), 156. 1951, Entre la libertad y el miedo
(Santiago de Chile: Editorial del Pacífico, 1952).
23. Ibid., 160–161.
24. Germán Arciniegas, América Ladina, Ed. Juan Gustavo Cobo Borda
(México: Fundación de Cultura Económica, 1993), 417–422 (“Sobre dos
famosas autobiografías de Salvador de Madariaga y Waldo Franco,” 1953).
25. Ibid., 412. (“El ensayo en nuestra América,” 1956).
26. Ibid., 415. (“El ensayo en nuestra América,” 1956).
27. Ibid., 414.
28. Ibid., 213 (“La cultura, derecho del hombre,” 1962).
29. Ibid., 107 (“José Martí,” 1959).
30. Ibid., 100 (“José Martí,” 1959).
31. Ibid., 108 (“José Martí,” 1959).
32. Ibid., 115 (“José Martí,” 1959).
33. Ibid., 219 (“Civilización y barbarie,” 1965).
34. See Indalecio Liévano Aguirre, Bolívar (Caracas: Fundación Editorial El
perro y la rana, 2011), 136. The first edition was in 1949 (Bogotá: El
Liberal).
35. Ibid., “El Congreso De Panamá: Bolivarismo Y Monroísmo,” Desarrollo
Económico, 1968, 8, no. 30/31: 193–241.
36. Ibid., 215–222.
37. Organization of American States, Acta de la sesión extraordinaria celebrada
el 19 de julio de 1983, aprobada en la sesión del 9 de diciembre de 1983.
Organización de los Estados Americanos (Washington, D.C.: Secretaria
General de la Organización de los Estados Americanos, 1983), 1–23.
38. Germán Arciniegas, América Ladina, Ed. Juan Gustavo Cobo Borda
(México: Fundación de Cultura Económica, 1993), 387–391 (“Santander,”
1991).
39. Ibid., 389.
40. Ibid., 389.
41. Ibid., 388.
 12  THE BOLÍVAR-SANTANDER POLEMIC IN COLOMBIA: GERMÁN…  347

42. Ibid., 390–391.

43. Ibid., “Vámonos, aquí no nos quieren,” (From Bolívar, de San Jacinto a
Santa Marta, 1988).
44. See: David Bushnell, Simón Bolívar, proyecto de América (Argentina:
Editorial Biblos, 2002) and David Bushnell, The Making of Modern
Colombia: A Nation in Spite of Itself, Berkley, Los Angeles, London:
University of California Press, 1993.
45. David Bushnell, “Santanderismo y bolivarismo: Dos matices en pugna,”
Desarrollo Económico, 1968, vol 8, no 30/31.
46. García Márquez, The General in His Labyrinth, 52.
47. David Bushnell, Review of El general en su laberinto, The Hispanic
American Historical Review 70, no. 1 (1990): 200–201.
48. Indalecio Liévano Aguirre, Rafael Nuñez (Bogotá: Ediciones Librería
Siglo XX, 1944). See pages 180–181 and 430. For his remarks on
Santander, see page 175.
49. García Márquez, The General in His Labyrinth, 202.
50. Gabriel García Márquez, The General in His Labyrinth (Vintage
International). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition,
Chapter 6, location 2351.
51. García Márquez, The General in His Labyrinth, 180.
52. Ibid., 131.
53. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la
Mancha (Madrid: Taurus: 1960).
54. García Márquez, The General in His Labyrinth. García Márquez provides
an inventory of Bolívar’s possessions in several moments, including pages
6, 30–31, and 209–210.
55. See Seymour Menton, Latin America’s New Historical Novel (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1993), 199. Menton cites Michael Palencia-
Roth on the subject of Bolívar’s amatory episodes in El general en su laber-
into. Menton agrees with Palencia-Roth that Miranda Lindsay is fictional.
56. José Gil Fortoul reports in his Historia Constitucional (p. 332) that Bolívar
was with a woman on that evening.
57. For the account that García Márquez is mostly likely using for his fiction-
alization, see J. Manuel Restrepo, Historia de la revolución de Colombia en
la América meridional (Besanzón: Imprenta de José Jacquin, 1858), 387.
58. García Márquez, The General in His Labyrinth, 81.
59. García Márquez, The General in His Labyrinth, 77.
60. Ibid., 173–174.
61. Ibid., 162.
62. García Márquez, The General in His Labyrinth, 230.
63. Ibid., 231.
348  R. T. CONN

64. Aline Helg, “Simón Bolívar and the Spectre of ‘Pardocracia’: José Padilla
in Post-independence Cartagena,” Journal of Latin American Studies
2003, 35, no. 3: 447–471, 462.
65. Ibid., 229.
66. Ibid., 49–52.
67. Ibid., 180.
68. John Lynch, Simón Bolívar: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2006), ix.
69. Ibid., 22.
70. García Márquez, The General in His Labyrinth, 114.
71. Idem.
72. Lynch, Simón Bolívar: A Life, 23.
73. García Márquez, The General in His Labyrinth, 96.
74. Ibid., 217.
75. Germán Riaño Cano, El gran calumniado: réplica a la leyenda negra de
Santander (Bogotá: Planeta, 2001).
76. Jorge Alí Triana, Bolívar soy yo (Colombia: CMO Producciones, 2002).
 CHAPTER 13

Bolívar and Sucre in Ecuador:

A Case of Two Assassinations

Bolívar has played an important role in Ecuadorian national identity, though,

since the 1880s cultural and political discourse has revolved more around
the figure of his much lauded and trusted lieutenant, Antonio José de Sucre.
At this time, the embattled Ecuadorian state, subsequent to the long tenure
of the conservative Gabriel García Moreno and the political crisis that his
assassination on August 6, 1875, entailed, turned to Sucre to elevate the
hero of Bomboná and Pichincha and become a symbol of the nation. The
identification of Sucre with the state did not take place only in the context
of a polity in need of a symbol, but also in that of a region, as Ecuador had
before it the example of Venezuela, with which it had once formed a union,
short lived though it was, and from which its first president, General Juan
José Flores, hailed. But what occurred on a massive scale in Venezuela
assumed a different form in Ecuador. There the Sucre revival was far more
modest than its Bolivarian counterpart, playing a role in state formation, but
without becoming a site of adulation or of a hegemonic intellectual tradition.
Sucre’s ascent from politicized figure to symbol of the modern nation
began in 1884, just five years after the Venezuelan bolívar replaced the
venezolano in Venezuela, with a new national currency bearing Sucre’s
name. Weathering several devaluations, the sucre lasted until 2000 when it
was abandoned in favor of the US dollar in a process called dolarización.
The year 1892 saw the erection of a statue of Sucre in Quito, the work of
the French sculptor A. Falguiere. At the turn of the century, in 1900,
Sucre’s remains were discovered. Missing since the early 1830s and subject

© The Author(s) 2020 349

R. T. Conn, Bolívar’s Afterlife in the Americas,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26218-1_13
350  R. T. CONN

to claims by the Venezuelan and Bolivian governments beginning in the

1890s, they were found entombed in the Iglesia del Carmen Bajo (the
Church of Lower Carmen), after which they were transferred to the Santa
Iglesia Catedral de Quito (the Holy Cathedral Church of Quito). They
were then memorialized with all the pomp and ceremony commensurate
with the funereal celebrations of a recently deceased state leader. In 1911,
another statue of Sucre was dedicated, this time in Guayaquil, sculpted by
the Italian Augusto Faggioni Vannuncci. In 1924, celebrations were held
marking the victory at Ayacucho. And 1930 saw the centenary of Sucre’s
death just as it did that of Bolívar’s, with multiple interventions of differ-
ent kinds by scholars, writers, and statesmen. The military also made
explicit claims on Sucre, portraying him as an inspired, precocious strate-
gist, who at the time of the Battle of Pichincha was still a young man,
27 years of age. In addition to publishing books and pamphlets to honor
him, in 1975 the army had its corps of engineers erect a museum in the
Cima de la Libertad (Independence Summit), the site of the Pichincha
battle. In the museum are prominently displayed life-size replicas of Sucre
and Bolívar dressed in elegant military attire as well as room-sized models
of the Pichincha battle with six-inch-high ceramic soldiers lined up to
show patriot and royalist troop movements.
The process of construction of these icons in Ecuador has occurred in
three periods, the first in the 1830s to the 1870s in the context of continu-
ing civil wars and the Catholic politics of Gabriel García Moreno, the
second in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the third
in the late twentieth century amid social and political activism. In all three
moments, Bolívar has been of great significance, though ever since the
1880s when Sucre was embraced by the state the Libertador has appeared
in something of a supporting role, celebrated alongside his lieutenant who
was assassinated upon returning to Quito on June 4, 1830, the first of the
two major assassinations for Ecuador, the second that of Gabriel García
Moreno 45 years later.
During the final decades of the twentieth century and the beginning of
the twenty-first century, when the names of Sucre and Bolívar were not
spoken, that of another “Liberator” was, the Quito native Manuela Sáenz
who, in addition to being Bolívar’s lover and confidant, came to be part of
his inner circle. After Bolívar’s death, she was forced out of Bogotá and
after years living in Jamaica she had desired to return to Ecuador in 1835.
President Vicente Rocafuerte, fearing she would undermine the peace
recently established, denied permission for her to do so. Although she
died in exile in Paita, Peru 21 years later, her legacy lived. Throughout the
 13  BOLÍVAR AND SUCRE IN ECUADOR: A CASE OF TWO ASSASSINATIONS  351

19th and 20th centuries, there was widespread interest in her life and con-
tributions to independence. As the historian Pamela Murray shows, Sáenz
in the early 1990s was recuperated by the feminist movement in Ecuador
and in the wider Andean region as a symbol of the empowered woman.
Interestingly, one of the results of that activism, as Murray also points out,
was that the Ecuadorian government in 1997 raised Sáenz’s rank from
that of colonel to that of general, correcting an oversight purportedly
committed by the military and political men of her time who did not
understand the true value of her service to independence.1
In 2002, the Ecuadorian industrialist Carlos Alvarez Saa, riding the wave
of interest in the quiteña, established in Quito the Manuela Sáenz Museum,
displaying furniture and other objects that once belonged to her, and as if
taking his cue from the Venezuelan Bolívar tradition with its fetishization of
Bolívar’s writings and letters, Sáenz’s missives to the Liberator.2
With the presidency of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, Ecuador found itself
in a regional dynamic concerning its relationship to the other Bolivarian
nations. How national, ideological, and regional forces interact to define the
scope and range of the meaning and relevance of Ecuadorian icons is central
to our discussion. Sáenz, who is extremely important in the Venezuelan
tradition, where she is frequently represented as Bolívar’s sole partner, a
result of reconstructions of her figure by the conservative Bolivarian Society
of Venezuela, became a focus for Chávez when in 2006 the Venezuelan
leader made a point of visiting the Sáenz Museum during a state visit,
reminding Ecuadorians that “Ecuador” had once belonged to the transna-
tional state that was Bolívar’s Gran Colombia and that the country therefore
in the present enjoyed a natural alliance with his Bolivarian republic.
In regard to the figure of Bolívar, the point and manner of contact
occurred at a different and more politically profound level with the estab-
lishment of the Movimiento Alianza País (Country Alliance Movement)
an association of Leftist parties with a nationalist bent and whose leader
was Rafael Correa. Beginning with the formation of that alliance in 2006,
Ecuadorian Leftist parties, inspired by Chávez’s Bolivarian Revolution,
used the Liberator’s name as well as that of the Left-leaning mid-twenti-
eth-century strongman José María Velasco Ibarra. Lastly, with regard to
Sucre, in what is one of the more interesting and significant developments
in relationship to Chávez in Ecuador and the Andean region, the Alianza
Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Nuestra América-Tratado de Comercio de
los Pueblos (ALBA-TCP) (The Bolivarian Alliance for the People of Our
Americas) established a virtual currency for trade among the Bolivarian
countries called SUCRE, an acronym for Sistema Único De Compensación
352  R. T. CONN

Regional (A Single System For Regional Compensation). With this, the

final death knell of the Ecuadorian sucre, whose defunct status made the
new currency possible, perhaps sounded.
The three great forces in the nineteenth century were liberalism or con-
stitutionalism, militarism, and Catholicism. Throughout his political
career, Ecuador’s first president, the Venezuelan general Juan José Flores,
presented himself as Ecuador’s “constitutional” protector, the leader who,
resisting the ambition of other generals, as he viewed himself, transformed
the three departments of the District of the South of the Gran Colombia—
Ecuador, Guayaquil, and Asuay, the first of which he had been intendente
(intendant)—into a constitutional republic. Through all the political
maneuverings that saw him hold on to power and then, after going into
exile, seek to regain it, as when he undertook to incorporate Ecuador into
the Bourbon monarchy in the late 1840s and in the 1850s when he landed
in Guayaquil from his perch in Lima, accompanied by a contingent of
soldiers, he promoted himself as father of the nation, claiming direct polit-
ical and moral descendance from Bolívar. In an open letter to the
Ecuadorian people written from Bayonne, France, on March 17, 1847, he
explains his credentials as a liberator, close ally of Bolívar, and the founder
of Ecuador. He was doing so to protect his reputation after his defeat in
1845 at the hands of his long-time rival and ally Vicente Rocafuerte and
by Vicente Ramón Roca, the two together who put an end to his control
of the executive, and after his failed expedition to make Ecuador part of
the Bourbonic empire, an expedition that became known to the public
before it got off the ground, with Roca, who was president, making plans
to defeat the vessels that had been provided by Spain before they launched.
A humiliated Flores first speaks of his distinguished Bolivarian beginnings,
then explains that had he and the 1000 men accompanying him actually
arrived in Ecuador, Ecuadorians could have made the decision to reject
them. Furthermore, those 1000 men would have been immigrants, he
insists, coming to work the land and make the society stronger.3
Rocafuerte, for his part, previous to his defeat of Flores in 1845, had
challenged his foe’s lineage claims, attacking the notion that he was the
bearer of the Bolívar mantle. In essays published in 1843 and 1844  in
Guayaquil and Lima, he, in fact, presented Flores as just the opposite, the
individual who betrayed Bolívar, first, by declaring Ecuadorian indepen-
dence from the Gran Colombia on August 14, 1830, and second, by being
one of the possible agents behind the Sucre assassination:

And this miserable one, around whose head gravitate charges of complicity
in the noisy assassination of Berruecos, who still has the nerve and
 13  BOLÍVAR AND SUCRE IN ECUADOR: A CASE OF TWO ASSASSINATIONS  353

s­hamelessness to speak of killing, of dungeons, and of illegal procedures?

Why does he lose his time in calumniating me, instead of answering the
tremendous accusations made against him in a work published in this capital
last year? Why does he not show his innocence? Why does he not explain
satisfactorily the strange phenomenon of how he can be so innocent and
nevertheless, be the only one who has reaped such advantage from that
despicable crime that justly or unjustly many impute to his ambition?4

With regard to the problems facing the country, Rocafuerte asserts that
they lay with Flores. Unlike leaders in Venezuela and Colombia, Flores
was working against the establishment of institutions, institutions that in
the case of Venezuela, upon which Rocafuerte heaps great praise, were
being carefully managed—the 1811 constitution, for instance, recuper-
ated in the moment of the 1830 republic—or in New Granada, the coun-
try in the 1840s reaffirming its legislative tradition. Instead of building
upon what others had done before him, Flores, Rocafuerte insists, replaced
the constitution of Ambato with his own, suppressing freedom of religion
and of the press and not allowing juries to be adopted; did not attend to
the national military for the reason that he only cared about his hench-
men; abolished municipal councils; obstructed commerce with monopo-
lies; and placed excessive taxes on neighbors’ products, “for which reason
Ecuadorian products had been excluded from markets in Peru and New
Granada.”5 If only the Venezuelan general, whom he describes as an adu-
lator of Bolívar,6 had returned to Venezuela, his homeland, after Bolívar’s
death, as other generals from the former captaincy general and now repub-
lic had, Ecuador would have developed democratically and with a stronger
economic system.7 Flores finally returned from his comfortable exile in
Peru in 1860, though not at the head of an invading army or with the aim
of occupying the presidency. He came to give military assistance to
Conservative leader Gabriel García Moreno, who the year before had
taken power. Interestingly enough, Flores, in 1859, in what was a testa-
ment to the place of distinction he occupied among the elites in Peru and
the symbolism with which he constantly sought to invest himself, deliv-
ered the main address at the unveiling of Lima’s Bolívar statue that had
been promised by Peru’s 1825 congress.
García Moreno sought to modernize Ecuador. He created schools and
hospitals, built roads and started the construction of a railroad linking
Guayaquil to Quito, and he did away with the exploitative indigenous trib-
ute. He also used extraordinary authoritarian methods to accomplish his
goals. First, he established a formal alliance with Rome, inviting the Jesuits
into the country to head up the educational institutions and create a social
354  R. T. CONN

order.8 Second, in 1869, he had a new constitution approved that gave to

him absolute power. García Moreno referred to his army as “the liberating
army”9 and in 1872, during his second presidency, had a statue of Bolívar
commissioned to be placed in Guayaquil where he and Flores had won vic-
tory over Francisco León Franco and Peru in 1860.10 But García Moreno
did not speak Bolívar’s name at an ideological or political level.
Nor had the constitutionalist Rocafuerte, who had formed part of the
Spanish Cortes. With the incorporation of Quito and Guayaquil into the
Gran Colombia in 1823, Rocafuerte did not miss a beat. He now sings the
praises of the 1821 Cúcuta Constitution in a political tract that proudly
announces to the world that the constitution is a replica of that of the
United States with a few necessary modifications. And, he battles with
Flores after 1835 in defense of the Ambato Constitution.11
In using Catholicism to legitimize his modernization project and to
create a stable Ecuador, free of civil war, García Moreno lashes out at and
demonizes the Liberal Party both in speeches and in print. Everywhere he
could, he detailed the accomplishments of the modernizing state, telling
of the small villages to which his administration was arriving with schools
and medical services, at the same time he weaponized Catholicism. He
describes his Liberal rivals and anyone who did not agree with him as
moral-less Luthers deserving of death.
Enter the political writer and humanist Juan Montalvo. Taking advan-
tage of Bolívar’s prestige in Ecuador, the liberal polemicist, who went to
southern Colombia after García Moreno’s military victory to begin his
attack on his figure, sought to identify Bolívar exclusively with the Liberal
Party and disassociate him for good from the Conservative Party, where
his figure resided on account of Juan José Flores. Publishing “Los héroes
de la emancipación de la raza hispanoamericana” (“Heroes of the
Emancipation of the Hispanoamerican Race”) in the 1870s and including
it in his famous 1882 collection, Siete tratados (Seven Treatises), Montalvo
in this essay accords a privileged position to Bolívar, characterizing him as
a great military leader comparable in stature to Napoleon and Washington
and identifiable with the values of nineteenth-century liberalism. The text
draws on Felipe Larrazábal’s 1865 tomes but turns violence into virtue,
going in the opposite direction of the Venezuelan intellectual.12 Montalvo
opposes the apparently purposeful and justified violence of the wars of
independence to the apparently criminal violence perpetrated by García
Moreno, ­particularly after his new 1869 constitution, imagining that when
Latin America becomes a great civilization the lesser known protagonists
 13  BOLÍVAR AND SUCRE IN ECUADOR: A CASE OF TWO ASSASSINATIONS  355

on both the Spanish and Spanish-descended sides of the conflict who

participated in its genesis would be remembered in the same way that the
minor characters in the epics told by Virgil and Homer were when Greece
and Rome became powers.13
But in addition to Montalvo’s reclaiming of the Spanish racial/intellec-
tual heritage in an effort to constitute a space in which to reflect on the
moral and political limits of the Ecuadorian state, what is of particular
interest is the graphic manner in which violence runs through his text as
well as the different rubrics under which violence appears, ranging from the
necessary and moral to the personal and depraved or criminal. In a world
in which the rule of law was purportedly yet to be established—as made all
the more evident, Montalvo submits, when García Moreno violated the
constitution by taking a third term—dying by the dagger is the de facto
instrument of change, decried when the victim is an ally, celebrated when
an enemy. In this way, Bolívar embodies violence in an exemplary fashion
as man of letters and warrior. In other circumstances, as Montalvo tells the
reader, Bolívar would have been a masterful and inspired poet, but the
historical moment to which he belonged demanded he take up the sword,
and it was by the sword that he produced his truest poetry. The charge that
he was cowardly in battle because in certain instances he fled to preserve his
life or that he was dictatorial in his treatment of subordinates, in particular
in connection to his decision to execute Píar, charges made most famously
by Ducoudray-Holstein, are dismissed. Bolívar, Montalvo puts forth, stood
above his contemporaries as the one who had to survive, the one who had
to be dominant and obeyed so that independence could be achieved. Dying
in and of itself in combat did not rise to the heroic or justifiable. Finally, if,
as we have seen, Felipe Larrazábal celebrates Bolívar the letter writer as part
of his poetics of sentimentality, Montalvo, we can say, recuperates the figure
Larrazábal is writing over—the leader who understands the necessity of
violence, issuing his Decree of War to the Death. In the comparison drawn,
García Moreno is now covered with senseless blood, the War to the Death
conjuring images of horror. In his use of power, he has descended to the
depths of Bolivar in 1813 and 1814, but with no justification to have done so.
As for Antonio José de Sucre, Montalvo also presents him from the
perspective of the world of violence that he is organizing according to its
epic and criminal iterations, giving special attention, as Rocafuerte already
had, to Sucre’s assassination at the hands of General José María Obando.
Saying nothing of Obando’s military and political career, which are
important for the Republic of New Granada (Colombia), Montalvo
­
decries as criminal and vile the killing of one so noble and virtuous by one
356  R. T. CONN

so inferior and vile.14 The victories at Pichincha and Ayacucho are high-
lighted. But for Montalvo, Sucre’s murder by a rival who was also a rival
of Bolívar carries utmost significance, as does the allegation that this mur-
der was not an isolated act of violence but rather, as he insists, one around
which was built the Ecuadorian state. The issue as Montalvo conceives it
boils down not only to the facts of leadership, but also to the matter of
public reception, the latter, which he interrogates. How could the name of
García Moreno, Montalvo asks his readers, prosper when the names of
those who were truly great, Bolívar and Sucre, fall upon impious lips? In
the reckoning he called for, he was stating that it was his contemporaries’
duties to see to it that the virtuous be properly rewarded and the criminal
who lack proper respect for their names be properly punished, the binary
of good and evil standing against García Moreno’s own discourse of
Catholic regeneration. And punishment was, indeed, the fate that befell
García Moreno, assassinated by freemasons, including one who was a
reader of Montalvo and who responded to his call for tyrannicide.
Montalvo exulted, commenting on the power of the written word to
effect change!
And who were the assassins? The reader of the epic critic of García
Moreno was Roberto Andrade. Andrade, who for many was never brought
to justice, went on to be a prolific writer and major historian. Living for
decades clandestinely and imprisoned briefly in Peru, he published in
Ecuador and abroad. He was exculpated by a Liberal government in the
late 1890s. Another conspirator was the one who in fact killed García
Moreno, using a machete to do so. Andrade fired on the prostrate body of
the fallen executive.
In the frequent interventions he made in the press and the multiple
books he wrote after the brutal killing of García Moreno, Andrade is
utterly unrepentant, celebrating the day of the assassination with the pride
and satisfaction of one who had used the only means possible to restore
the republic, a modern-day Brutus, and defending himself before contem-
poraries and posterity by citing not only Caesar’s assassin but others from
classical and modern times who applauded the so-called puñal de salud
(purification dagger). Such interventions provoked ire in Ecuador and
Peru, with many calling him a threat to the nation for what he said in the
press, the assassination almost less primary than the way he represented it.
Throughout his writings, Andrade will be a thorn in the side of the
Ecuadorian state as he lashes out and sparks memory. His participation in
 13  BOLÍVAR AND SUCRE IN ECUADOR: A CASE OF TWO ASSASSINATIONS  357

the assassination of the country’s head of state, the most well-known act
of this kind in Latin America’s nineteenth century, drove him to write. He
had to justify a murder. When the Ecuadorian state in 1883 replaced its
currency with the sucre, following the example of Venezuela’s Guzmán
Blanco, Andrade would take aim. But we are jumping ahead in the story.
Several narratives came to be identified with Sucre in the long process
that was the revival of his figure, but the one that would dominate the
Ecuadorian understanding of his figure was the narrative of betrayal.
Bolívar was the first to give voice to it. In the moment he learned of
Sucre’s assassination at Berruecos on June 4, 1830, Bolívar in a letter
compared his trusted and much-admired lieutenant to Abel. Rocafuerte
and Montalvo promoted the narrative in nineteenth-century Ecuador,
Rocafuerte linking Flores to the assassination in his bid for political capi-
tal.15 Twenty years into the Sucre revival, at the moment of the discovery
of Sucre’s remains, the theme of betrayal reemerged. But first, who was
Sucre’s assassin? Who was Cain? And how might we characterize the first
phase of the revival?
The person thought to have ordered Sucre’s assassination is General
José María Obando, convicted in absentia in an 1842 Bogotá court.
Having rebelled against Bolívar in 1828 at the time of his dictatorship only
to be reintegrated soon after into the Liberator’s army with his rank ele-
vated to that of general, Obando wanted to rid the region of a figure, so
went the argument, who, subsequent to Bolívar’s death, was the only
leader with the ability and authority to hold together the Gran Colombia
and thereby suppress the regional interests of the elites who were moving
to separate from the Gran Colombia. From the 1830s until his death,
Obando was a popular though controversial caudillo in the Republic of
New Granada, serving as vice-­president and acting president of the transi-
tional government between 1831 and 1832, sharing an exile with the
famous Argentine intellectuals Domingo Faustino Sarmiento and Juan
Bautista Alberdi in Santiago in the 1840s after the guilty sentence handed
him, and serving as president for a year in 1853 before famously refusing
to declare a dictatorship when challenged by an alliance of Liberals and
Conservatives. But if in the Republic of New Granada, Obando was
brought to trial and convicted, after the liberal Santanderista bloc had lost
power to the conservative Bolivarian bloc, the case against Obando was of
less concern to Ecuadorian leaders of the time, particularly to Conservatives,
who had a vested interest in forgetting the infamous assassination that,
358  R. T. CONN

some argued, permitted the establishment of the new Republic of Ecuador

under the leadership of Juan José Flores, a rival of Sucre.
Flores was seen as benefiting from Sucre’s assassination when not as a
co-conspirator himself, though there was never any clean evidence against
him, and he was never charged in court. Those who suspected Flores spoke
of his efforts to position himself in the eyes of Bolívar as the future leader
of the region and of the uneasiness he would have felt upon learning of
Sucre’s decision to take up residence in Quito following his resignation as
president of Bolivia to live with his Ecuadorian wife. Another element to
consider with regard to Flores’s possible involvement in the assassination is
the fact that at the request of New Granadan conservatives in the early
1840s, he agreed to take his army into the area of Popayán to fight Obando.
The decision to do so can be read perhaps in two ways. Either Flores aimed
to settle a score, avenging the murder of a major hero of independence by
bringing the “guilty Obando” to justice, or he sought to eliminate a pos-
sible one-time ally who could implicate him in the event the powers of the
day were ever able to put him physically on trial. But, however we view
Flores’s decision to go to battle with Obando at great expense to his new
and fledgling country, the fact that he engaged him militarily would have
earned him the support of the New Granadan conservative faction that
wanted justice for Bolívar’s anticipated successor, and added to Flores’s
credentials throughout the region as a defender of the Bolivarian legacy.
For the new post-García Moreno state, the currency bearing Sucre’s
name and image would rise above factionalist politics. The sucre, the image
engraved both in paper and in coin, was that of the victor at the battles at
Pichincha and Ayacucho, the one who had been glorious and virtuous in
the manner of the republican victors of Rome. Liberals had used Sucre in
their attacks not only on Flores, but also on Flores’s associates and
descendants, recalling to this end the moment of the assassination. Now
the Conservatives including the new parties that had come into being such
as that of Flores’s son Antonio Flores Jijón, the progressive Catholic Party,
portrayed Sucre as a figure who was above the fray. The new currency with
the Roman-like image of Sucre went a long way to accomplish a percep-
tion of stability and consensus that had been absent from the politics of
the past. But an obstacle soon emerged. After just 16  years promoting
these values through the new coinage, Sucre’s remains were ­discovered,
including a relatively intact cranium showing the mortal bullet wound
inflicted by Obando’s guns-for-hire.
 13  BOLÍVAR AND SUCRE IN ECUADOR: A CASE OF TWO ASSASSINATIONS  359

The hands of the political elite were forced.16 They now had to contend
with a story that Andrade was keeping alive, and now with all the more
reason because of the new coinage. Antonio Flores, in the moment the
sucre was to be adopted, wrote a tract celebrating Sucre while exculpating
his father with, as he said, the best evidence he could find.17 But what now
would they do with Sucre’s body? How would they narrate his assassina-
tion without calling into question figures like Flores or the Conservative
political party? Furthermore, in what was the greater challenge, how
would they do so such as to portray the event in a manner supporting the
new consensus among the elites and helping to constitute the state in the
same way the currency did? Various functionaries within the state appara-
tus provided the answer: reimagine the assassination as a “national” his-
torical event that could serve as a site of collective mourning and of
collective identity.
Of course, it is common for death and the ceremonies surrounding it
to be used to perform such a function, particularly in Catholic Latin
America where, as we have stated earlier, leaders and heroes are
memorialized on the day of their passing rather than that of their birth.
Roberto Andrade, in an essay entitled “La juventud” (“Youth”), written
in 1883, speaks of this fact in relation to the ashes of García Moreno.18 In
the estimation of the aggressively unrepentant Andrade, for whom the
function of youth is precisely to perform the kind of act he performed,
Brutus making the state whole again, the Ecuadorian government should
not have honored García Moreno after his passing. By doing so, it sent the
wrong message to the nation’s citizens, including García Moreno’s
successor, whom Andrade and Montalvo initially admired, then came to
loathe after he too in their view became corrupted by power. The message
that was being sent by the state, Andrade warns, was that the abuse of the
political office of the presidency could not only go unpunished but could
also be forgotten, the memory machine of the nation being such as to
ensure that its executives only be remembered as “illustrious.”19
What about Sucre’s remains and the new information then? If they
were discovered, was it better for the elites that they be returned to
Venezuela or sent to Bolivia? Interestingly, at the time that the authorities
first believed that they were about to discover them, that is, in 1894, it was
stated publicly that they would be returned to a Venezuelan state desirous
of placing them in a cenotaph at the nation’s pantheon in time for the
centenary celebration of his birth in 1898; Venezuela had sent a distant
relation of Sucre to retrieve them.20 Bolivia had also sought to recover his
360  R. T. CONN

remains from the Ecuadorian state for the 1898 centenary. But by the time
the remains were, in fact, located and disinterred, in 1900, the authorities
in charge of the decision had reversed themselves, perhaps in response to
the public outcry against Venezuelan repatriation that had occurred in
1894.21 Whatever the reasons may have been, the consequences of that
reversal were significant, inasmuch as possession of Sucre’s remains gave
rise to a new kind of narrative constructed not only around the ideas of
collective mourning and identity, but also, then, around the related
concepts of recuperation and custodianship.
No individual gave voice to this new narrative more powerfully than the
bishop who delivered the memorial address at Quito’s Metropolitan
Cathedral at the moment of the transfer of Sucre’s remains from one holy site
to the other on June 4, 1900, 70 years to the day of the assassination.22
The narrative around which Archbishop Federico González Suárez
organized the address was, as one might expect, expressed in Catholic
terms. As the archbishop, who was a scholar in his own right, explained to
a public made up of Ecuador’s elites, Sucre’s murder was a Christ-like sac-
rifice executed by individuals incapable of seeing beyond the selfish, egotis-
tical principles that political parties encourage if not mandate. But in the
Christ-like portrayal of Sucre that he fashioned, all was not lost, for Ecuador
had the opportunity in the future to renounce organizing itself around the
dynamic of the political-party structure which, as González Suárez would
have it, is what caused Sucre’s assassination.23 What Ecuador had to do,
indeed, what the members of the elites seated in his audience had to do, in
what Suárez offered as a narrative of reparation and redemption, was com-
mit to the public Christian values for which Sucre stood: nobility and vir-
tue. All, whether Conservative or Liberal, were equally guilty, equally
heathen, and were to atone. All, progeny included, had the moral obliga-
tion to live their lives as citizens rather than as affiliates of a party. As for the
murder, González Suárez constructs a new version, using the fact that it
occurred on foreign soil to define its meaning. He leaves out, as expected,
any mention of Flores’s possible involvement or of the fact that Flores ben-
efited politically from the act, whether he was behind it or not. In the
national/foreign terms used by the bishop, party politics first reared its
ugly head outside the nation, specifically on present-day Colombian soil
and only then penetrated Ecuadorian territorial limits. Ecuadorians could
see the origin of their sin as coming, then, from without, the path to moral
cleanliness being eradication of that which was not Ecuadorian. Here was a
narrative that could have resonated, given the fact that in 1900 Colombia
was in the midst of a major civil war, the War of a Thousand Days.
 13  BOLÍVAR AND SUCRE IN ECUADOR: A CASE OF TWO ASSASSINATIONS  361

Roberto Andrade would have nothing to do with such reconciliation,

remaining committed to his partisan history throughout his life and hav-
ing lived clandestinely until the charges against him were lifted by President
Eloy Alfaro in 1896 with the victory of his Liberal Party.24 That meant
reaffirming the accusations against Flores even as Ecuadorian liberalism
moved forward, while also attacking the state mechanisms of memory
production. It was not just the father. Not missing a beat, he asserted that
Flores’s legacy continued through the son, Antonio, who, as we have
begun to see, had become politically important in the final decades of the
nineteenth century, first as part of García Moreno’s administration, then
as president of Ecuador in the 1890s. Andrade was prolific. Through his
multi-volume history of Ecuador his essays, and his edited volumes of the
writings of Rocafuerte and Montalvo, he stoked the nineteenth-century
polemic about executive authority in Ecuador. Andrade was seeking to
define and build an intellectual tradition for Ecuador in which he would
figure as successor to the two, and custodian of their legacies. Thanks to
him, we have many of Rocafuerte’s and Montalvo’s texts in editions.
The nineteenth-century polemic about the form of the state and the
legitimacy of using violence outside the then accepted context of civil war
reappeared in 1930, the year not only of the Bolívar centenary celebrated
across the hemisphere, but also of the Sucre centenary, which was
commemorated in Ecuador as well as in other countries. Andrade did not
stay in Ecuador to participate, but instead traveled to Cuba, wanting an
international audience to hear him. The issue was how to memorialize
Sucre, and certainly words coming from one like Andrade linking Sucre’s
death to the beginnings of the republic would have either not been
appreciated or not been allowed. In the Ecuador of the twentieth century,
to speak of Sucre properly was to tell a story of continuity between the
beginnings of the nation and the present, which meant using Sucre as a
platform for a political tradition purportedly built on a bloodless beginning,
the assassination of Sucre having nothing to do with the rise of Flores.
In 1924, giving voice to this official interpretive line was historian
Cristóbal de Gangotena y Jijón who produced, in the moment of the cen-
tenary celebration of Ayacucho, a work entitled Ensayo de iconografía del
Gran Mariscal de Ayacucho, Don Antonio José de Sucre, y algunas reliquias
suyas y del Libertador que se conservan en Quito. Publicación hecha con
motivo del primer centenario de la victoria de Ayacucho, 1824–1924 (An
Attempt at an Iconography of the Great Marshall of Ayacucho, Don Antonio
José de Sucre, and of Some Relics of His and of the Liberator That Have Been
362  R. T. CONN

Preserved in Quito). The book includes representations of Sucre in oil

paintings, painted miniatures, drawings, and coins from Ecuador as well as
other countries, including Venezuela and Bolivia.25 Many portraits of
Sucre, we learn, were made after he passed, and were based on an 1823 oil
painting by (arguably) the best portraitist of the times in Quito, Antonio
Salas, and on an 1828 painted miniature by José Sáez.26 Six years later at
the 1930 centenary in Quito, Juan de Dios Navas E. of the National
Academy of History eulogized Sucre, declaring that Obando was the
guilty party for his assassination—the one who committed the betrayal.
He said nothing, as one would expect, of the intrigue involving Flores.27
This attempt at identifying the assassin was becoming routine. In 1953, a
publication appeared with state funding, which was supposed to speak for
itself, there being no prologue or notes. This was the transcript of the trial
by the Supreme Court of New Granada in 1842, a trial that determined,
with the confessions of the person who pulled the trigger, that Obando
alone was the one who gave the order to kill Sucre.28 The reader who
picked up the document could find the truth as if no time had elapsed
between past and present, the transcript seeming to come directly from
the mid-nineteenth century with the context of the republication ren-
dered invisible, whether by negligence or not.
The narrative presented by Andrade in Cuba in 1930 could not have
been more different from that of Juan de Dios Navas E. Pleading his case,
Andrade makes what amounts to a juridical argument against Flores,
alleging in his analysis of a series of letters Flores sent to Bolívar and to
Obando, the latter with whom he maintained correspondence through-
out the episode of the assassination, that he had motive to kill Sucre.29
Andrade is tenacious, not letting up in his promotion of the old Ecuadorian
Liberal Party’s view of Flores’s involvement in the murder. But to defend
this interpretive line, he also had to do battle not only with the Ecuadorian
state which insisted that only Obando was behind it, but also with
respected foreign interpreters of Ecuador’s nineteenth century like the
Uruguayan essayist, José Enrique Rodó, who brought out in 1913 an
essay on Montalvo, a brilliant rendering of the career of this intellectual as
well as of Ecuador’s nineteenth century.30
To be sure, Rodó’s brand of liberalism could not have been more dif-
ferent from that of Montalvo as well as that of Andrade. Rodó, in his
essays, sought to create a foundation for his vision of the humanities in
Latin America while avoiding the oppositional politics of contemporaries
and predecessors such as the Ecuadorian intellectuals in question.
Endeavoring to make Montalvo speak for him within his own humanistic
 13  BOLÍVAR AND SUCRE IN ECUADOR: A CASE OF TWO ASSASSINATIONS  363

project, he says nothing of Montalvo’s hermeneutic distinguishing

between epic and criminal violence, presenting to the public a Montalvo
who in a key moment in his career in fact stood opposed to two equally
militarized Conservative and Liberal Parties.31
Sucre’s assassins, then, were hardly of interest to Rodó, nor those of
García Moreno. Donning the hat of the positivist, specifically of the soci-
ologist, he seeks to identify moments in Ecuador’s nineteenth century that
can serve as the building blocks for the central role that he wants the
humanities to play in Ecuadorian society. Rodó seeks to move beyond the
connection between writers and political parties, but Ecuador has a long
way to go to modernize, having elements that are fiercely resistant to
change. It is a hierarchical world, one in which in the first decades of the
nineteenth century the majority indigenous were still enslaved, in which
the land was still owned by the few, in which the clergy dominated all
aspects of society, and in which lawyers were useless, caring more about the
form of the law than about using it for the benefit of others. In Argentina,
Rodó speculates, Rocafuerte would have risen to the heights of a Sarmiento;
in Chile of a Montt. Montalvo himself would be regarded as nothing less
than heroic, accomplishing all that he did—the journal he produced over
four years without the assistance of anyone nothing short of heroic. Rodó’s
statements telling of a republic that marginalized Rocafuerte and
Montalvo—hostile to men of culture—are similar to those he makes in his
famous 1900 essay Ariel, where he speaks about the relationship of Latin
America to the United States. Similarly addressing the matter of great men
in the countries that are theirs, he describes Edgar Allen Poe and Ralph
Waldo Emerson as being marginalized in a capitalist society that does not
recognize the value of writers and art.32
For some readers, such a vision of Montalvo as humanist could perhaps be
hard to imagine let alone accept. One foreign interpreter, an historian, Peter
V. N. Henderson, in a 2008 book that recuperates García Moreno as a mod-
ernizer describes Montalvo’s words of criticism of García Moreno as exagger-
ated, typical of the propagandist that Montalvo was, a talented essayist living
in Colombia and “out of touch with the people of his own country.”33 With
regard to the president’s assassins, Henderson speaks of highly educated ide-
alists who should have known better than to be moved by Montalvo’s
screed.34 Rodó, as we are seeing, is pushing in the opposite direction, finding
in Montalvo’s writings elements of the new kind of intellectual he is trying to
create, one who in this moment channels his propaganda not to support one
of the two political parties but “to promote the autonomous action of those
who understand liberty in its organic and cultured forms.”35
364  R. T. CONN

For Rodó, here was a writer who could serve as inspiration to a new
century committed to the humanities, which in Ecuador finally in the
twentieth century had the promise of flourishing after being cut down by
Flores in the 1830s with the assassination of a key intellectual leader, an
Englishman named Francisco Hall, who was a disciple of the British
thinker Jeremy Bentham.36 Modernity, the category that Rodó deploys,
had to be based on rational values, with intellectuals leading the way, inde-
pendent of political parties, and producing works for society at large. The
humanities would perform a new role as propaganda, serving not political
parties but the citizenry he imagined.
Another highly respected foreign interpreter in the historical moment
was the Venezuelan intellectual Rufino Blanco Fombona, about whom we
spoke in Chap. 6 and who wrote an essay on Montalvo in 1912. This was a
prologue to a new edition of the most well-known work of Montalvo, Siete
tratados, a prologue in which he seeks to make Montalvo’s biography and
other works of his known to the Spanish and greater Latin American
public.37 For Blanco Fombona, Montalvo is the preeminent nineteenth-
century writer who invents his own literary style and who courageously
stands up to state power, not accepting ministerial posts or funding from
those who would seek to co-opt him, dying in exile and in poverty, and even
purportedly refusing financial assistance from a fellow Liberal, none other
than the Venezuelan president Antonio Guzmán Blanco, who looked upon
him from afar with admiration.38 Dignity knows no borders, no outside
where one can slacken one’s values, Blanco Fombona seems to be stating.
He celebrates not only Montalvo for not accepting anything from Guzmán
Blanco, but also the Cuban intellectual José Martí who would rebuff him
when in Caracas in 1881. In contrast, he denigrates the much-celebrated
contemporary of Martí who would die in 1916, the Nicaraguan poet,
Rubén Darío, who associated with the presidents of El Salvador and Chile
and who spoke in his literary texts of his desire to be bourgeois.39
Blanco Fombona had recently left Venezuela, refusing to participate
in the government of Juan Vicente Gómez. He was already an admirer
of Montalvo, telling decades later of how, as we heard him remember in
the earlier chapter, Gómez’s police took along with his other family
heirlooms a Montalvo letter proudly kept by his family. Blanco Fombona
states that Montalvo, whom he also is sure to describe as erudite, with
knowledge of several languages including Latin and Greek, stands up
not only to García Moreno, but also to all those who occupy the office
of the executive unscrupulously and/or using excessive violence. He is
 13  BOLÍVAR AND SUCRE IN ECUADOR: A CASE OF TWO ASSASSINATIONS  365

not the inventor of a humanism that transcends, in a particular moment,

political parties. He is a figure who remains true to his own principles
till the end, never sacrificing them. As for Ecuadorian history and the
matter of Flores’s connections to the assassination of Sucre, Blanco
Fombona finds little merit in the possibility of that connection. He
does, though, report on Montalvo’s advocacy of tyrannicide, telling of
his pleasure at the moment of the assassination and of his regret a few
years later when comparing the new tyrant to the old.40 But Blanco
Fombona, of whose important intellectual and editorial work we already
know, is creating his own canon of writers. Andrade, Montalvo’s self-
appointed successor to his legacy, does not figure in it.
Alone in Ecuador, Andrade refuses to reorient his understanding of the
role of the intellectual or of his narrative that goes from a Flores who
assassinated Sucre to Rocafuerte, from Rocafuerte to Montalvo, and from
Montalvo to himself. The debate about Sucre’s assassination still alive because
of him, it caught the attention of a Harvard professor in the late 1940s, just
after Andrade’s death. This was Thomas F.  McGann who undertook to
resolve the matter of whether Flores was behind Sucre’s murder by examining
New Granadan politics in the 1830s and 1840s.41 “There is evidence,”
McGann writes, “that a group of liberals—the anti-­Bolivarian federalists,
later the Liberals—dispatched to Obando, from their club in Bogotá,
information as to Sucre’s itinerary, together with orders to kill him.”42
After the assassination, Sucre’s Vargas battalion “went over to Flores in
Ecuador as a protest against Obando’s alleged guilt,” knowing the truth,
McGann speculates.43 General Rafael Urdaneta was so convinced of
Obando’s guilt that he charged both him and José Hilario López with the
crime after he rose up against Joaquín Mosquera, prevailing in battle on
November 3, 1830. Obando and López took the charge seriously, under-
standing that their fate rested on who controlled the state. “Replying,” as
McGann puts it, “to the charge,” they marched with their forces on May
15, 1831, with the “downfall of the accuser and the victory of the accused.”
Later that year, the Republic of New Granada was established with Obando
serving as provisional vice-president and with the Supreme Court—the
institutions of the Gran Colombia now serving the new state—absolving
him and López. In the years ahead, there was an 1836 letter written by
Santander in which the leader, speaking of the merits of Obando as the
Party choice for president, refers offhand to his killing of Sucre.44
Most important, perhaps, was the confession by Apolinar Morillo in
the 1842 trial of which we have spoken, republished by the Ecuadorian
366  R. T. CONN

state in 1953, namely that it was Obando who ordered Sucre’s murder, a
confession Morillo repeated several times in the moment of his execu-
tion.45 McGann also considers the matter of motivation. He states that
Obando, being ambitious, had incentive, while Flores, not being ambi-
tious, did not. In addition, he addresses the tension between Flores and
Sucre that was in evidence during the time of the Gran Colombia’s defense
of its District of the South (today Ecuador) against the invasion of
Peruvian forces. In the end, whatever tensions might have existed, the fact
is that Flores did not resist taking orders from Sucre, McGann concludes.46
Finally, he addresses the evidence against Flores, pointing out that it con-
sists only of Obando’s denunciation of him after he was defeated by
Centralists/Conservatives in 1841 with the assistance of troops sent by
Flores, followed by the Conservative Party’s attempts at extraditing him
from Peru and Chile after the 1842 trial.47
McGann is performing two interpretive operations. On the one hand,
he uses the facts of New Granada politics as he saw them, particularly as
this concerned control of the legal structure, to clear Flores, and put an
end to a polemic that had motivated intellectual discourse in Ecuador for
a century. On the other hand, in making that argument, he turns the story
of state formation in New Granada inside out. What in Ecuador had been
understood as a New Granadan and Ecuadorian murder mystery was now
only a New Granadan one involving more than just Obando.
To recap, the moments are: the rising up of Urdaneta in what was still the
Gran Colombia; Urdaneta’s defeat at the hands of Obando and López; the
declaration of the new autonomous state of New Granada with the provi-
sional vice-president the person who killed Sucre, Obando; and finally the
return from Europe of Santander. Case closed? Perhaps. But if Obando and
López had earlier revolted against Bolívar’s dictatorship, they certainly had
motivation to revolt again when Urdaneta seized the presidency of the Gran
Colombia from the person who had been elected by the Admirable
Congress, Joaquín Mosquera. In fact, when Urdaneta negotiated a truce
with Obando and López, Obando did not seize the presidency himself,
moving to install in it the ousted Vice-President Domingo Caycedo. Was
McGann ignoring the version of the story telling of military men who
restore legitimate government? Santanderists would yes. Bolivarianists
would respond with a resounding no, insisting that Obando simply wanted
to take control of the political structure to avoid being adjudicated.
But coming to a definitive conclusion with regard to the matter of
Flores’s responsibility is beside the point. For resolving it is less signifi-
 13  BOLÍVAR AND SUCRE IN ECUADOR: A CASE OF TWO ASSASSINATIONS  367

cant than how the matter of his involvement has been used discursively
by political parties and intellectuals in the process of state formation.
Peter V. N. Henderson is right to condemn Montalvo for promoting the
killing of García Moreno and Andrade for executing the act as a
conspirator, but in their strong voices of opposition are the elements of a
critical tradition that resisted autocratic state formation, voices that,
however we judge them, must be accounted for to understand the politics
of a nation and to understand how that politics has been represented
subsequently in the battle to define and legitimize political regimes. As
we saw in Chap. 5, Venezuelan historian Vallenilla Lanz with his Bolivian
Law celebrates García Moreno as one among several nineteenth-century
caudillo presidents who in effect govern without constitutions. Andrade,
undoubtedly, was aware of Vallenilla Lanz’s deployment of García
Moreno to support the regime of Juan Vicente Gómez. In previous
decades he witnessed the authoritarianism of Mexico’s Porfirio Díaz.
Authoritarianism was the norm. All of this would have provided him with
additional motivation to speak of and even celebrate the assassination of
an Ecuadorian head of state and with this to continue to forge the
intellectual tradition for Ecuador that he insists is the tradition. His
multi-volume history of Ecuador together with his editions of the writ-
ings of Rocafuerte and Montalvo fell on deaf ears, though. Rocafuerte
and Montalvo are known in Ecuador and Latin America separately from
Andrade, who never became the heir to them that he hoped to become.
Non-Ecuadorian actors like Rodó and Blanco Fombona, then McGann
and Henderson, also contributed to this, writing him out of their
histories.

Notes
1. Pamela S. Murray, “‘Loca’ or ‘Libertadora’?: Manuela Sáenz in the Eyes of
History and Historians, 1900–c.1990,” Journal of Latin American Studies,
Vol. 33, No. 2 (May, 2001), 291–310.
2. Ibid., 309–310. Murray speaks of Saa’s lack of professionalism in con-
structing the site, giving as an example of this the fact that he refused to
permit the Sáenz letters on display to be authenticated.
3. Juan José Flores, “El general Flores a los ecuatorianos” (Bayona: Impr.
Foré et Laserre, 1847), 26.
4. See Vicente Rocafuerte, 1908, Prol. Roberto Andrade, A la nación (Quito:
Tipografía de la Escuela de Artes y Oficios, 1908), 179. “¿Y este miserable,
sobre cuya cabeza gravitan cargos de complicidad en el ruidoso asesinato
368  R. T. CONN

de Berruecos, tendrá todavía el descaro, y la desvergüenza de hablar de

matanza, de caldazos y de ilegales procedimientos? ¿Por qué pierde su
tiempo en calumniarme, en lugar de contesar a las tremendas acusaciones
que le hacen en una obra publicada en esta capital, el año pasado? (1) ¿Por
qué no manifiesta su inocencia? ¿Por qué no explica satisfactoriamente el
raro fenómeno de que siendo inocente es sinembargo el único que haya
sacado grandes ventajas de este espantoso crimen, que, justa o injusta-
mente muchos imputan a su ambición?”
5. Ibid., 144.
6. Ibid., 211.
7. Ibid., 215. “… porque la independencia del Ecuador no necesitaba el aux-
lio de nadie: era una consecuencia forzosa del nuevo orden político que se
estableciera en esas dos secciones principales de la República de la
Colombia, que por lo mismo que ella se componía de tres partes, separadas
las dos de la tercera, quedaba esta libre e independiente. ¡Qué funesta ha
sido para el Ecuador la ingenerencia del ominoso Flores en su separación
de Colombia. ¡Cuán diferente sería su suerte si, a este perverso intrigante,
acompañado de sus genízaros, hubiera entonces vuelto a Venezuela, su
Patria. ¡Cuántas calamidades se hubieran evitado.”
8. Gabriel García Moreno. Escritos y discursos de Gabriel García Moreno
(Quito: Imprenta del Clero, 1888), 277 (Al congreso constitucional de
1871, 277–290).
9. Gabriel García Moreno. Escritos y discursos de Gabriel García Moreno
(Quito: Imprenta del Clero, 1888), 15 (Proclama a los habitantes de
Guayaquil y Manabí) (Proclamation to the Inhabitants of Guayaquil and
Manabí), July 28, 1860.
10. See the following link, which tells of the fire company that initially pro-
moted the idea of commissioning the statue. Accessed August 22, 2018:
http://www.guayaquilesmidestino.com/es/monumentos-y-bustos-
hist%C3%B3ricos/del-centro-de-la-ciudad/monumento-ecuestre-al-
libertador-simon-bolivar.
11. Vicente Rocafuerte, Ensayo político. El sistema colombiano, popular electivo,
y representativo, es el que más conviene a la America independiente (Nueva
York: En la imprenta de A. Paul, 1823).
12. Juan Montalvo, Siete tratados, Tomo Segundo (Besanzon: Imprenta de José
Jacquin, 1882). “Los héroes de la raza hispanoamericana” 456. “Restrepo
y Larrazábal han tomado a pechos el transmitir a la posteridad las obras de
Bolívar y más próceres de la emancipación.” “Restrepo and Larrazábal
have taken very seriously the job of transmitting the works of Bolívar and
other heroes of emancipation.”
13. Juan Montalvo, Siete tratados, Tomo Segundo (Besanzon: Imprenta de José
Jacquin, 1882). “Los héroes de la raza hispanoamericana.” 94–95.
 13  BOLÍVAR AND SUCRE IN ECUADOR: A CASE OF TWO ASSASSINATIONS  369

14. Ibid., 94: “Para un Bolívar más de un puñal; para un García Moreno no
hay sino bendiciones.” “For a Bolívar more than one dagger; for a García
Moreno there are only benedictions….”
Ibid., 96: “En todo tiempo lo gobiernos se ha fundado y consolidado
por medio de la cicuta y el puñal.” “In all times governments have been
founded and consolidated through hemlock and the dagger.”
15. See: Vicente Rocafuerte, Prol. Roberto Andrade, A la nación (Quito:
Tipografía de la Escuela de Artes y Oficios, 1908).
16. Cristóbal de Gangotena y Jijón, 1924, Ensayo de iconogrofía del Gran
Mariscal de Ayacucho, Don Antonio José de Sucre, y algunas reliquias suyas y
del Libertador que se conservan en Quito. Publicación hecha con motivo del
primer centenario de la victoria de Ayacucho, 1824–1924 (Quito: Imprenta
Nacional), 85.
17. Antonio Flores, El gran mariscal de Ayacucho—el asesinato (New York:
Impr. de “Las Novedades,” 1883).
18. Roberto Andrade, La juventud (Quito: Impr. de Manuel V. Flor, 1883).
19. Ibid., 23.
20. Restos del Gran Mariscal de Ayacucho: documentos publicados por la Legación
de Venezuela (Quito: Legación de Venezuela, 1895).
21. Manuel Segundo Sánchez, Los restos de Sucre (Caracas: Litografía del
Comercio, 1918).
22. González Suárez, Federico, “Discurso” in Homenaje del Consejo Municipal
de Quito a la Memoria del Gran Mariscal de Ayacucho, General Antonio
José de Sucre, en el Primer Centenario de su Muerte, 1930 (Quito: Imprenta
Municipal, June 4, 1900), 23–60.
23. Ibid., 39.
24. See Roberto Andrade, Ed. Hernán Rodríguez Castelo, Pacho Villamar
(1900) (Guayaquil: Publicaciones Educativas “Ariel,” 1972), 11–12.
25. Cristóbal de Gongontena y Jijón, Ensayo de iconogrofía del Gran Mariscal
de Ayacucho, Don Antonio José de Sucre, y algunas reliquias suyas y del
Libertador que se conservan en Quito. Publicación hecha con motivo del
primer centenario de la victoria de Ayacucho, 1824–1924 (Quito: Imprenta
Nacional, 1924).
26. Ibid., 8.
27. Juan de Dios Navas E., El gran mariscal de ayacucho Antonio José de Sucre:
su vida y su muerte 1795–1830 (Quito: Tip. Salesiana, 1930).
28. Causa criminal seguida contra el coronel graduado Apolinar Morillo, demás
autores y cómplices del asesinato perpetrado en la persona del jeneral Antonio
José de Sucre, 1953 (Quito: Editorial “Rumiñahui”). The testimony had
previously been published in New Granada by order of the Colombian
Executive Authority in 1843.
370  R. T. CONN

29. Roberto Andrade, Academia de la Historia de Cuba. Antonio José de Sucre.

Discurso leído por el academicó correspondiente, Sr. Roberto Andrade, en la
sesión solemne celebrada el 4 de junio de 1930 en conmemoración del centena-
rio de la muerte del gran mariscal de Ayacucho (La Habana: Imprenta “El
Siglo XX,” 1930).
30. José Enrique Rodó, “Montalvo” in Ariel, Liberalismo y Jacobinismo,
Ensayos. Ed. Raimundo Lazo (México: Editorial Porrúa, S.A., 1991).
Original date of publication is 1913.
31. Ibid., 220. “Las fuerzas populares se repartian entre el conservatismo cleri-
cal y sanguinario de García Moreno y el liberalismo soldadesco y relajado
de Urbina. La reacción contra el primero tendía a buscar brazo y efiacia en
los prestigios del último; pero Montalvo repugnó esta solidaridad, y man-
teniéndose distante de uno y otro partido, encaminó su propaganda a sus-
citar la acción autonómica de los que entendiesen la libertad en formas
orgánicas y cultas.” “The popular forces were distributed between the
clerical and sanguinary conservatism of García Moreno y and the soldier-
like and loose liberalism of Urbina. The reaction against the former tended
to look for support and effectiveness in the prestige of the latter: but
Montalvo was averse to that solidarity, and keeping a distance from both
parties, directs his propaganda to provoke the autonomous action of those
that understood liberty in organic and cultured forms.”
32. José Enrique Rodó, 1991, “Ariel” in Ariel, Liberalismo y Jacobinismo,
Ensayos. Ed. Raimundo Lazo (México: Editorial Porrúa, S.A.), 44.
33. Peter V.N.  Henderson, Gabriel García Moreno and Conservative State
Formation in the Andes (Austin: Texas University Press, 2008), 211.
34. Ibid., 218.
35. José Enrique Rodó, Ariel, Liberalismo y Jacobinismo, Ensayos, 220.
36. Ibid., 214.
37. Juan Montalvo, Siete tratados, Intro. R. Blanco Fombona (Paris, Garnier
Hermanos, 1912).
38. Ibid., xvii–xviii.
39. Ibid., xviii.
40. Ibid., xxxiv.
41. Thomas F. McGann, “The Assassination of Sucre and Its Significance in
Colombian History, 1828–1848,” The Hispanic American Historical
Review 30, 1950, no. 3 (1950): 269–289.
42. Ibid., 273–274.
43. Ibid., 273–275.
44. Ibid., 275.
45. Ibid., 281.
46. Ibid., 284–289.
47. Ibid., 280–282.
 CHAPTER 14

Vasconcelos as Screenwriter:
Bolívar Remembered

To talk about José Vasconcelos’s 1939 screenplay Simón Bolívar

(Interpretación) (Simón Bolívar [An Interpretation]), we need to retrace a
bit of history. As we touched upon in Chap. 1, Mexico was one of the hemi-
spheric sites of the 1930 centenary celebration of Bolívar’s passing. The year
marked a new beginning. For Pascual Ortiz Rubio, who was welcomed as
the new president elect by the Pan American Union in Washington, DC, in
late 1929, had won a landslide victory in an electoral process that had seen
violence against José Vasconcelos’s campaigners and supporters, and ballot-
ing compromised by massive fraud, the first act of the political party Partido
Nacional Revolucionario (PNR) (Revolutionary National Party) established
by Plutarco Elías Calles that in 1946 would rename itself the Partido
Revolucionario Institutional (PRI) (Institutional Revolutionary Party).
These were the early moments of Mexico’s post-twenties order. Vasconcelos
was out, having lost brutally in his battle with Calles, while there was a new
party that had been formed against him, able to use the apparatus of free
elections to elevate the relatively unknown Ortiz Rubio to the office of the
presidency, the second person to serve as a puppet to the caudillo Calles
whose power was now located not in himself alone, but also in the PNR. For
Ortiz Rubio, the centenary was a boon, permitting him to establish a new
beginning while at the same time to synchronize Mexico with the Pan
American Union, one more Latin American head of state eager to be part of
Washington, DC’s America and perhaps with the fantasy that the authority
invested in him could rise above that of Calles.

© The Author(s) 2020 371

R. T. Conn, Bolívar’s Afterlife in the Americas,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26218-1_14
372  R. T. CONN

The addresses, dedications, essays, and papers produced in the course

of the year, with some read at the amphitheater that was now part of the
National University, spoke of a heroic figure with whom Mexico had been
united in one and the same process of liberation and national progress. Of
Venezuela, there was little mention, as the Venezuelan state and Mexico
were locked in diplomatic battle.
Mexico had severed relations with Gómez’s government in 1923, mak-
ing this break in the context of its own foreign policy aiding liberal oppo-
nents of dictatorship within its Latin American zone of influence, and
would not resume relations until 1933.1 Among the Venezuelan exiles
who came to Mexico in the 1920s was Cipriano Castro who resided in
Puerto Rico and was still trying to find a way to take back the government
from Gómez. Venezuelan exiles were not only liberals, but also commu-
nists such as Gustavo Machado, all in battle with Gómez and Vallenilla
Lanz, the latter, who, as we have seen, argued that constitutions had no
efficacy, justifying in this way the need for powerful personalistic leaders to
preside over a society evolving according to the slow and careful path he
imagined. Gómez’s economic machine that was supported by the United
States had to be redirected. In 1929, Venezuelan exiles in Europe and the
Americas undertook a military assault against Gómez that failed.
The 1930 Mexican Bolívar centenary consisted of a ceremony orga-
nized by the secretariat of foreign relations that featured addresses by the
Peruvian ambassador and an ex-Mexican senator; of a speech sponsored by
a civic action group that was delivered on the street named for Bólivar,
right in front of the house where 16-year-old Simón stayed during his visit
to Mexico to meet with the viceroy;2 of a student competition for best
essay at the Universidad Nacional, won by Andrés Iduarte whose work
was included in the proceedings of the centenary, as were all the tributes
we are citing;3 and of professional societies such as the Mexican Society of
Geography and Statistics and the National Academy of Sciences where
speakers celebrated Bolívar while addressing issues in their professions.
One spoke of Gabino Barreda in 1862, the future founder of the
Preparatory School, telling of how he urged the city council of Mexico
City to declare an American Confederation, a vision similar to Bolívar’s if
not inspired by it, in order to help push the French out of the country.4
Another, an engineer, told of the centenary events of that year in Peru,
Guayaquil, Bogotá, New York City, the hall of the Pan American Union in
Washington, DC, Panama, Venezuela, a town named Bolívar in Vizcaya
(Spain), and La Paz.5
 14  VASCONCELOS AS SCREENWRITER: BOLÍVAR REMEMBERED  373

This was hardly, then, the heavily politicized Bolívar that Vasconcelos
had constructed in the 1920s through muralism, as we saw in Chap. 1. A
new set of individuals and groups were speaking Bolívar’s name within the
context of civil society, not empire. With regard to Mexico’s and Bolívar’s
connections, they could have spoken about much more.
There is Bolívar’s 1815 Jamaica Letter, where he details the bloodshed
caused by Fernando VII’s counter-revolution in New Spain in an effort to
portray Spain as barbaric and where he issues a recommendation to New
Spain’s leaders of independence that they should draw upon the popular
religious symbol of the Virgin of Guadalupe to direct the masses, not the
figure of Quetzalcoatl, of interest only to scholars. Bolívar, in the letter,
was addressing the priest turned military leader José María Morelos who
had assumed leadership of the insurgent army, having been appointed to
this position subsequent to the capture and execution of Father Miguel de
Hidalgo in 1811. Morelos called a constituent congress in 1813, the
Congreso de Anáhuac (Congress of Anáhuac), with the congress declaring
independence on November 6 of that same year. He was captured on
November 5, 1815 by Agustín de Iturbide, tried by the Inquisition, then
executed on December 22, 1815. He was still alive when Bolívar finished
the letter on September 6. Following Morelos as the leader of the insur-
gent army was Vicente Guerrero.
In relation to Guerrero and Iturbide, they could have also addressed
Bolívar’s 1829 article intended for publication in which he attacks Vicente
Guerrero who lost the presidential elections of 1828 but who took the
office by force, alleging corruption, on April 1, 1829. Guerrero, who was
approved by Mexico’s congress, abolished slavery on September 15; he
also enacted progressive measures, such as public schools, free education,
and agrarian reform. But Conservatives ousted him in December of that
year, driving him to the south with the new government seizing and exe-
cuting him in 1831. Accused of being responsible for the decision were
secretary of war José Antonio Facio and cabinet member Lucas Alamán.
Alamán was a conservative political figure who was founder of Mexico’s
first bank, a mover and shaker of industry, and an historian. He, along with
the military leader and politician Santa Anna, defined the era of the 1820s
to the 1850s.
Bolívar, who had employed Iturbide’s son on his military staff for two
years, in the unpublished article describes Guerrero as “barbaric” on
account of his mestizo and African heritage. Bolívar lists Guerrero’s violent
acts, including his involvement in the triumvirate that had decided to
374  R. T. CONN

e­ xecute the senior Iturbide in 1824.6 His action in that moment in rela-
tion to Iturbide represented yet another dramatic reversal. In 1821,
Iturbide and Guerrero established an alliance after Iturbide changed sides
in order to take advantage of the desire by Spanish monarchists to bring
about independence as quickly as possible so that there would be a state to
serve as a stronghold for absolute monarchy during the time of the resto-
ration of the Cortes (1820–1823). Los Tratados de Córdoba (The Treaty
of Córdoba) in 1821 called for Fernando VII or a European monarch to
rule the independent state, but Fernando VII refused the invitation after
seeing that he could come back to power at home and members of the
Holy Alliance also were unwilling to supply a prince to be monarch. In the
case that both options failed, the treaty called for Iturbide to assume the
role of emperor, which he did. His liberal opponents then chased him
from power, with Iturbide returning from Europe in 1824, not realizing
that he would be executed if identified.
Bolívar, for whom Guerrero was the beginning of the end, was siding
with Mexican conservatives. Guerrero was Bolívar’s new Píar, his new
Padilla. Would he have approved of his execution had he lived to see it?
What would be have said about Alamán?
Finally, in connection to Bolívar’s support of the royalist turned inde-
pendentist Iturbide, the individuals and groups in question could have
also spoken of a long ode produced by Ramón Valle for the 1883 cente-
nary celebrations of Bolívar and Agustín de Iturbide in Mexico, Bolívar e
Iturbide en el centenario de ambos heroes (Bolívar and Iturbide in the
Centenary of Both Heroes).7 To be sure, there is more cultural work about
Bolívar that might have been referenced if we were to look, for example,
at Gustavo Vargas Martínez’s book, Presencia de Bolívar en la cultura
mexicana (The Presence of Bolívar in Mexican Culture).8
If the 1930 Centenary was produced to erase the memory of 1929,
Vasconcelos in his exile did not let go of what had happened to him, in
his writings speaking of the acts of which he and his supporters had been
victim. In 1939 and 1940 he published the screenplay entitled Simón Bolívar
(Interpretación) that will be at the center of our discussion as well as a pro-
logue, brought out together at Ediciones Botas in Mexico City. Vasconcelos
wrote the work at the tail end of his years-long exile from Mexico at the
moment of yet another expulsion, this one from the United States, and the
stint he did as vice-chancellor of the Universidad del Noroeste in Hermosillo,
Mexico. He was embattled but that was nothing new.
 14  VASCONCELOS AS SCREENWRITER: BOLÍVAR REMEMBERED  375

In the prologue, which has the force of a manifesto, he explains to a

public that knows him well why he writes in a new genre as well as why he
focuses on the liberator of northern South America. Bolívar, after all, was
not Mexican. Part of that explanation centers on Pan Americanism, which
in the 1910s, 1920s and 1930s, as we saw in Chaps. 9 and 10, undertook
to unite “north” and “south” in one vast administrative apparatus, receiv-
ing in Washington, DC, as recorded in its bulletin, new presidents of the
member states and their ministers, and which Vasconcelos critiques directly
in an essay published in Santiago, Chile, in 1934, “Bolivarismo y Monroísmo
(Temas Iberoamericanos)” (“Bolivarianism and Monroism (Iberoamerican
Themes)”).9
Another part of the explanation concerns the US film industry and its
Mexican affiliates, which, with his signature vehemence, he accuses of indoc-
trinating Mexicans with the ideas of “our dominators.” To illustrate this, he
draws his readers’ attention to one film in particular, Warner Bros.’ 1939
Juarez, with its US and Mexican versions.10 Vasconcelos dismisses the film as
pro-Yankee, a reflection of an entire industry. Still, this intellectual, who was
primarily an essayist and cultural critic, responds to Hollywood, Pan
Americanism, and the Mexico that in his mind betrayed him in 1929 by try-
ing his hand at something he attempts only sporadically in his long and
turbulent career: the literary arts, and in this particular case screen writing.
When discussing Mexico in the first half of the twentieth century, we
can hardly avoid speaking of Vasconcelos. He was secretary to Mexico’s
first revolutionary president, Francisco Madero, in Washington, DC
(1911); cofounder of Mexico’s most important cultural institution after
muralism, the Ateneo (1909–1913); vice-chancellor of the Universidad
Nacional (National University) (1921–1924); head of the Secretariat of
Public Education (SEP) (1921–1924); promoter of literacy and hygiene
programs (1921–1924); patron of the muralists (1920–1924); candidate
for the presidency, as we have seen (1929); director of the National Library
(1940–1958); and founder of literary journals. Vasconcelos was also a dis-
tinguished if not controversial exile, residing now in the United States
(1930, 1935–1938), now in Spain (1931–1933), now in Argentina
(1933–1935). At the level of his intellectual production, with the excep-
tion of his famous memoirs, he is known primarily as an essayist whose
visions of Mexican culture and history were defined by his understanding
of his nation and the rest of Latin America as culturally different from the
United States and as economically and racially subjugated to an “Anglo-­
defined U.S.” order and who stood against Bolshevism.11
376  R. T. CONN

One work of his obtained a wide readership throughout Latin America,

and to this day continues to be read with great interest, particularly in
Mexico and the United States. This is his 1925 “La raza cósmica” (“The
Cosmic Race”) that, seizing upon the teleological impulses of national-
ism and the race theory of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centu-
ries, speaks of a Latin America that will one day embody socialist principles
and be home to a new hybrid race mixing over time so-called superior
and inferior racial stocks. It is a top-down vision of uplift and racial inte-
gration, put forward from the imagined heights of Mexico’s white
Hispanic tradition, that targeted as inferior Mexico’s indigenous peoples.
In this stark and troubling way, it stands in opposition to the work of the
muralists that he in fact spearheaded in his role as head of the SEP, par-
ticularly that of Diego Rivera and Clemente Orozco, who were thinking
about the Americas in the context of empire and modernity just as
Vasconcelos was but who elevated the indigenous. Our interest lies in the
Vasconcelos of the 1930s who, with essays such as “Bolivarismo y
Monroísmo” turns away from the concept of racial hybridity to embrace
what would become a new race-­centered platform for his battle with lib-
eralism and Bolshevism. What he had imagined as the trunk of a eugen-
ics-directed racially mixed whole now stood alone, mixing no longer a
value. This was unadulterated Spanish whiteness and Catholicism.
But the screenplay and prologue are not simply a curiosity in the life of
a figure who would sympathize with the Axis powers, renouncing
Mussolini and Hitler only after the discovery of the Holocaust but then
expressing his support for Spain’s Francisco Franco, a position opposite to
that of Lázaro Cárdenas who, as president of Mexico from 1934 to 1940,
and an enemy of Vasconcelos, embraced republican Spain by offering his
country as a home to its exiles; they provide an interesting window onto
Vasconcelos’s relationship to economic and cultural developments in the
United States, his Catholic politics in relation to the Cristero War of
1926–1928 and reformist or liberal ideology in Mexico, as well as his
understanding of the ideology of culture. In the vision he proposes,
Vasconcelos will stand with the white conservative Catholic Lucas Alamán,
not with the populist Afro-mestizo Vicente Guerrero in whose execution
the former was implicated. Alamán’s vision of Mexican and Latin American
economic development within the cultural context of Catholicism is a
foundational model.
In the pages that follow we examine first the film Juarez, then
the prologue—a text from which Vasconcelos’s screenplay, Simón Bolívar
 14  VASCONCELOS AS SCREENWRITER: BOLÍVAR REMEMBERED  377

(Interpretación) cannot be separated—and finally the screenplay itself. It

perhaps could be said that no one in Mexican letters in the twentieth cen-
tury has attached more significance to the power of myth and historical
figures than Vasconcelos. Previously, in his “La raza cósmica,” Plato’s lost
Atlantis had furnished him with a distinguished mythical origin from
which to reimagine Latin America. Now with his war against Pan
­Americanism that had seen him in the early 1920s oversee the organiza-
tion of a canon of hemispheric emancipators to oppose to that of the Pan
American Union—the latter soon to have its Gallery of Patriots filled with
busts sent from the 21 member republics—a canon that as seen in the
1922 mural of Roberto Montenegro includes a George Washington who
is anti-imperialist, that role can be filled by Bolívar.12 Vasconcelos’s Bolívar,
however, would not only be that of the Bolívar of independence, but also
that of the Gran Colombia and the Federation of the Andes. The state
builder. But first, a word or two about the film Vasconcelos targets in the
prologue and that motivated him to put the Liberator on the big screen
before, as he seemed to fear, his pro-Pan Americanist rivals in the United
States and Mexico did.
Juarez, according to historian Paul J. Vanderwood, was conceived in a
pact of sorts between Warner Bros. and the US government.13 The year
was 1938. Warner Bros. had just completed a script for a new antifascist
film based on the heroic figure of Benito Juárez, the leader who liberated
Mexico from Maximilian, the Habsburg prince imposed by the French
and Mexican conservatives during the French occupation of 1862–1867,
while the Roosevelt administration had just arrived at the decision that it
would use Pan American doctrine to oppose the German presence in the
Americas. Throughout the mid to late 1930s, as Michael E. Birdwell tells
us in Celluloid Soldiers: The Warner Bros. Campaign against Nazism, Jack
and Harry Warner, Polish Jews, had been making films to alert the public
to the danger of fascism and to argue for US intervention. To do so, they
had to contend with the State Department and the Pacific Coast Anti-­
Communist Federation, which, on account of US neutrality, “discouraged
movie-makers from the production of films dealing with conflicts
abroad.”14 Warner Bros. resorted, then, to plot lines that could not be
seen as directly anti-German, although the topic of fascism at home was
not off limits. The story of Benito Juárez fit their program, providing
them with an allegory about national resistance, just as the figure of Robin
Hood had for a film they brought out one year earlier.15
378  R. T. CONN

The United States, learning of the Warner Bros. project, asked the stu-
dio to present the struggle between Benito Juárez and the French from
the point of view of US Pan Americanism, the policy in the name of which
it had been seeking to dominate and create markets in Latin America in
the 1920s and 1930s. The studio complied, desirous, as Vanderwood
explains, of pleasing FDR, with whom it had intimate connections; of cur-
rying favor to stop an antimonopoly suit against the movie industry; and
of protecting itself from accusations of communist sympathizing by con-
gress and action groups.
The result was a new script that not only puts forth a heroic vision of
resistance to an illegitimate imperial power, but also states clearly US Pan
American claims over the “democratic” hemisphere in the face of Nazi
attempts at strengthening trade relations and cultural ties with Latin
American nations. As Vanderwood tells us, Juárez would now be por-
trayed not as he originally had been by the screenwriter Aeneas MacKenzie,
that is, as an obtuse Zapotec Indian resisting an outside power, but rather
as a hero of resistance less identifiable by his “ethnicity” than by his pas-
sionate admiration for Lincoln. Juárez, as a Mexican incarnation of
Lincoln, would stand for a “democratic” Mexico and a democratic Latin
America opposed to European expansionist desires.16
Benito Juárez held special significance for Vasconcelos. In “Bolivarismo
y Monroísmo”, he attacks the leader, holding him responsible for creating
the conditions that allowed the influx of foreign capital and Protestantism.
Juárez had ousted the French and separated church and state. But for
Vasconcelos—with his new Catholic politics born of the political instabil-
ity in Mexico in the 1920s, a decade that saw the rise of caudillo figures
like Calles and Obregón, and between 1926 and 1929 of armed conflict
by regional Catholic politicians and priests against the secularizing state,
the Catholic sector in part fueling Vasconcelos’s candidacy for presidency,
and his certainty that Mexican politics was being driven by US capitalist
interest—weakening the Catholic Church was tantamount to weakening
the nation. In fact, for the Mexican intellectual in exile, who presented
himself now as a defender of laborers not only in Mexico, but also through-
out Latin America, Juárez was nothing but “an incarnation of Pan
Americanism even before this movement made its objectives clear in
congresses.”17
Proof of this for Vasconcelos is the fact that Juárez’s bust, together with
those of other Latin American emancipators, stood in the Pan American
Building in Washington, DC.  Proof of this for him was also, more
 14  VASCONCELOS AS SCREENWRITER: BOLÍVAR REMEMBERED  379

importantly, the Juárez-sponsored disentailment of church lands, which,

Vasconcelos passionately argues, was what led to the arrival of new land-
lords, US and Anglo corporations, and new religious leaders: Protestants.
How he explains Juárez’s politics is significant. He links it to the fact of
his having been located in the United States. In an interesting formulation
in which the United States is presented not only as the place of refuge for
embattled Mexican leaders, but also as a cultural space so seductive as to
test their will to remain true to their “heritage.” Vasconcelos describes
Juárez’s anti-Church politics as having been born not of his own lights or
convictions as a lawyer or judge but of the supposed transformation he
experienced during his residence in New Orleans. Juárez succumbed to
temptation when others have not.
The list of Mexican intellectuals and politicians for whom the United
States served as a place from which to organize is a long one, among them:
Juárez and Melchor Ocampo in the 1850s, exiled by Santa Anna; the
Flores Magón brothers in the first decade of the twentieth century, anar-
chist critics of the Porfirian regime; and Vasconcelos in the 1930s, exiled
by Calles. In Vasconcelos’s revisionist conceptualization of Mexican his-
tory, if not Benito Juárez, the hero of the modern nation, then who is
Vasconcelos asking Mexicans to celebrate? Whom were they supposed to
idealize if the world depression now provided irrefutable evidence that this
Mexican Pan Americanist avant la lettre, falsely hailed as a hero for five
generations, was, in fact, a traitor, having delivered Mexico to the world
economy? There were two figures: one Lucas Alamán who in the 1830s
organized the Tacubaya Congress, to the disapproval of the United States,
to establish a commercial pact between the Hispano-American nations;
the other, President Francisco Madero who was to be praised as a states-
man for his alleged plan to restore to the Church the lands taken from it
first by Juárez and later by Porfirio Díaz.
Arguably, then, any creative piece, whether Mexican or US, praising
Benito Juárez would have disturbed Vasconcelos. Still, a film that had the
potential to reach a large audience, that was made in the United States (as
most were at the time), that was produced by Warner Bros., which advo-
cated US intervention in the European conflict, and that supported the
United States’ Pan American agenda would have outraged this critic of
Pan Americanism who, during the 1930s, in his attempt to find a model
of modernization to oppose to the United States, recuperated the Spanish
colonial enterprise, celebrating it for the “technology” it brought to the
manual laborers of Latin America.
380  R. T. CONN

That Vasconcelos would write a screenplay in reaction to the film indus-

try, and more particularly, Warner Bros.’ Juarez, was hardly the response
one would have expected. This was not only because Vasconcelos was not
a film artist, although in the prologue, to make his “debut” comprehen-
sible to the Mexican public, he claims to be a playwright manqué, forced
by historical circumstance throughout his life to write philosophical and
historical essays. This was also because Vasconcelos was certain, as he also
states in the prologue, that his foray into cinema would never go any fur-
ther than the written word.
First, as we know, Vasconcelos at this time enjoyed little influence in
Mexico, having just returned from a long exile in the United States that
had resulted from his call for civil revolt to protest the 1929 presidential
elections stolen from him by the political machine of Plutarco Elías Calles
who was supported by the US ambassador to Mexico Dwight Morrow, an
injustice of which he reminds readers until the end of his life. Second, even
if he had enjoyed the influence, in the prologue he tells us that he could
expect no cooperation from the “nascent” Mexican film industry, the pup-
pet, in his mind, of a Hollywood dominated by US political and economic
concerns, be they Liberal, or as charged by US congressman Martin Dies,
Jr., creator of the House Committee Investigating Un-American Activities,
and affirmed by Vasconcelos, Bolshevik. Whether this was paranoia or not,
Vasconcelos was no doubt visible on the radar of the US government not
only for the reason that he had refused to walk away quietly from the 1929
elections in which the United States had had such an interest, wanting to
bring a definitive end to the Cristero War and to do business with Calles
not with nationalists like Vasconcelos, but also because of the many public
speeches he gave throughout Latin America in the aftermath in which he
criticized US economic and political incursions. Vasconcelos had, then,
good reason to understand the US Labor Department’s denial of his visa
renewal request in 1938 as retaliation for his political positions.18
So why go to the trouble of composing a screenplay? One explanation
is so that he could write a prologue, that is, so that he could have a stage
on which to give expression explicitly to his view on Mexican-US relations
and his belief in conspiracy as the engine behind seismic political change.
It was a vision rooted in the fact that, with or without the knowledge of
Washington, DC, the US ambassador Henry Lane Wilson had allowed the
Mexican general, Victoriano Huerta, to use the US embassy for the
purpose of planning the assassination of the democratically elected
­
Francisco Madero and his vice president José María Pino Suárez, which
 14  VASCONCELOS AS SCREENWRITER: BOLÍVAR REMEMBERED  381

took place on February 22, 1913; and with regard to the 1929 presiden-
tial elections, in Calles’s close relationship with US ambassador Dwight
Morrow and the United States’ obvious approval of them but confirmed
by the reception received by the winner in Washington, DC.  Now, his
perception that history was conspiracy took on a life of its own in his new
attempt at building a Mexican and Latin American consciousness to resist
the United States and its Mexican allies, that perception serving as the
matrix for his famously Manichean, totalizing, culturally and racially based
ideas pitting Catholicism against Protestantism and Judaism.
A second explanation is that with US cinema having become a mass-­
media industry and with the Mexican film industry in ascendancy,
Vasconcelos, who more than any intellectual of his time envisioned for
himself a large mass public, would have wanted to comment, again explic-
itly, on this industry that threatened to eclipse his logocentric world and
that, in the case of Warner Bros., sought to demonize fascism.
A third explanation, related to the second, is that he wanted to propose
a model or a form for a future Latin American cinema. What better way to
go about proposing that model than to use as a foil the celluloid soldiering
associated with Warner Bros.?
As he tells his readers in a formulation that naturalizes the function of
film as essentially ideological, this new medium that he saw as combining
entertainment, learning, and indoctrination had the potential to be
extraordinary, provided that the aesthetic was given a proper place. This
had not occurred, he maintains, in the films of the era, particularly in
Warner Bros.’ Juarez, which he regards as vulgarly nationalistic, and as it
in fact was, costly. Nor had this occurred, one could think, in the film of
liberal nationalist Miguel Contreras Torres, director of the 1933 Juárez y
Maximiliano (Juárez and Maximilian). The Latin American cinema he
imagined would represent a new era.
A fourth explanation concerns the historic prerogative of the lettered
city that we know as the title of Ángel Rama’s famous book. Vasconcelos
wrote the screenplay and prologue to declare the priority of the written
word—el Verbo (The Word), as he calls it, with his familiar embrace of
Christian symbolism—over cinematic image. In a statement revealing his
concern about the diminishing authority of the print intellectual, he tells
his readers that the contribution of the script is more significant than that
of the cameramen, the director, or the actors. A fifth explanation, which
addresses the simultaneity of the writing of the prologue, is that Vasconcelos
from the beginning planned on publishing the screenplay. To the Mexican
382  R. T. CONN

public he needed to justify the idea that as a print form the screenplay had
value independent of its function in a filmic production. Put differently, he
needed to make the screenplay culturally intelligible as published text.
Curiously, to this end, he uses the authority of the US literary market,
reporting that publishing “filmodramas” such as his “for general dissemi-
nation” has become increasingly common in the United States, where
movie scripts are valued as texts in their own right, as are theatrical plays.19
A final explanation is that Vasconcelos, positivist that he was, needed to
announce his vision of the future, of future generations and glory. One
day, as he promises his readers in the “La raza cósmica,” poverty, colonial-
ism, physical ugliness, and injustice would be transcended by a new aes-
thetic order. Similarly, he now promises that one day the mediocrity of
Hollywood would be superseded by a Latin American cinema which,
while similarly mass produced, respected not only national interests, but
also quality, as constituted by such high culture activities as ballet and
orchestral music. Perhaps then, his Bolívar screenplay would find its way
onto the screen to take the place of that of filmmakers like Contreras
Torres, who was Vasconcelos’s nightmare. In 1941 Contreras Torres’s
completed a documentary-like film that was pro-Ally and “Mexican-
made” called Simón Bolívar, El Libertador, which was screened in
New York City in 1943 with copious English subtitles.20 Perhaps, at this
time, too, the Mexican leaders he praises so, Francisco Madero and Lucas
Alamán, for their positions on Catholic institutions, Catholic control of
land, and the economy would also be immortalized in film. For this
admirer of Hegel, the positivists, and Christian theology, of all things
structured around a trinity, Bolívar, Alamán, and Madero would assume
their proper place in the Mexico and Latin America that Vasconcelos
imagines, anchored in the Spanish Catholic tradition and forming part of
a new world order free of US hegemony.
Faith in the redemptive power of the written word: No Latin American
intellectual embodied this principle more than Vasconcelos. Yet the Bolívar
whom Vasconcelos constructs in Simón Bolívar (Interpretación) is not the
student of the famous educator Simón Rodríguez or the legendary writer
and legislator for the ages. In fact, we never see Bolívar writing, as we do,
for instance, in García Marquez’s The General in His Labyrinth. Nor do
we ever see him, for that matter, on the battlefield. Rather, the Bolívar that
we have before us is a ceremonial one wrapped in the monumentalism of
Latin American Catholicism and in the medium of filmic representation.
 14  VASCONCELOS AS SCREENWRITER: BOLÍVAR REMEMBERED  383

To produce this iteration of the figure, Vasconcelos differentiates

Bolívar culturally from the United States, portraying his social, ceremo-
nial, and political life as transpiring gloriously in a Hispanic Catholic
world. That world consists of monumental spaces in which the masses
welcome the mythical hero as he enters the liberated city. In one scene, we
see Bolívar depicted triumphantly entering the plaza of Caracas in 1813
(any plaza in the Spanish-American Colonial style will do, Vasconcelos
indicates in his scene directions). In another we see Bolívar being blessed
in a Quito cathedral by the archbishop following the Pichincha victory. We
also view the leader in a seat of honor at a Caracas dance hall watching
couples move to Sevillian, Spanish rhythms. We are told in the scene direc-
tions that this style of dance is to be understood by the audience as dis-
tinctly Hispanic or Latin American: The dancers are to use their legs and
hips, not their arms and shoulders, as Anglos do.
Furthermore, it is not simply that Vasconcelos presents Bolívar as part of
a ritualized public world different from that of the North. He creates a
figure who will convert to the Hispanic Catholic tradition, rejecting the
English and US liberal tradition Bolívar in fact admired. There is much that
Vasconcelos does to prepare the way for Bolívar’s epiphany. Throughout
the text we see figures close to Bolívar warning him about the Anglo world.
For instance, the German Alexander Humboldt, whom Bolívar may have
met in Paris in 1804, is portrayed telling the young future leader that he
must beware of England’s commercial designs on Latin America. In this
fictionalized scene Humboldt also tells Bolívar that the person who liber-
ates Latin America will need to be like Julius Caesar, not Napoleon.
One can imagine several reasons Vasconcelos insists upon the Roman
instead of the French imperial model. First, sympathizing as he did at the
time with the Axis powers, he could not deploy the comparison of Bolívar
to Napoleon since he did not want to be seen as supporting the French.
Second, the Caesarian model of imperial power was being evoked by
Benito Mussolini. The construction of Bolívar as Caesarian, then, was a
clear way of making the Venezuelan leader resonate with the “powers” of
the moment. Finally, Vasconcelos, with his long-standing Hispanic-based
cultural politics, saw the Gallic as a model of empire and culture that had
already failed in the Americas. In “La raza cósmica,” Napoleon is pre-
sented as a myopic, somewhat historically sinister figure to whom is attrib-
uted the rise of the United States in the Americas on account of his decision
in 1803 to sell it the Louisiana Territory. As far as Vasconcelos was con-
cerned, had Napoleon possessed the appropriate ethnic consciousness of
384  R. T. CONN

solidarity with Latin-based cultures, he would never have made a deal that
years later would pave the way for the United States to take or acquire the
northern provinces of Mexico.
The issue of empire, then, was central to Vasconcelos’s reflection. In
the screenplay, to make way for the Spanish Catholic Bolívar he imagined,
he has the leader enter into a discussion with a fictional French abbot he is
supposed to have met in Haiti in 1816 regarding the role of the Spanish
as economic colonizers of the Americas. As we know, Bolívar railed against
the Spanish empire in his famous 1815 Jamaica Letter. In order to “cor-
rect” this, Vasconcelos has the abbot, Gerard, address the matter of eco-
nomic development. Characterizing the Spanish as capable economic
administrators, the abbot cites Humboldt’s findings that they successfully
placed European crops in the New World, a formulation that is supposed
to directly refute Bolívar’s portrayal of the colonial administration in the
Jamaica Letter as obstructing Latin America’s development. With this, we
see Vasconcelos defending the notion he puts forth in “Bolivarismo y
Monroísmo” that of Spain as a nation possessing technologies accessible
to laborers at large and as an alternative, therefore, to corporate and indus-
trial modernity.
At the same time, unapologetic promoter of the white race in his vision
of the future of hemispheric culture that he now was in a new way,
Vasconcelos could not allow Bolívar’s identity as emancipator of the Afro-­
Latin Americans to stand. To this end, he in fact dedicates an entire scene
to Bolívar’s visit to Haiti and to his relationship with Alexandre Pétion,
who came to the aid of the independence movement not once but twice.
In a clear departure from his earlier, futuristic celebration of the tropics
in “La raza cósmica,” Vasconcelos portrays Haiti as the primitive bucolic
location of a purported inferior race and Pétion not as an individual but as
a representative of “his race,” as the so-called black president. Not that
Vasconcelos was concerned with being historically accurate, but we should
note that Pétion was bi-racial and that the politics in the Haiti of his time
pitted “blacks” against “mulattos.” Still, why would Vasconcelos have
insisted on constructing a scene in Haiti when he easily could have avoided
mention of Bolívar’s extraordinary debt, just as so many others have? The
reason is that Vasconcelos wants to explain how Bolívar could have come
to take up the cause of liberating the enslaved blacks, and furthermore,
how he could be regarded by later generations as an emancipator. Bolívar,
as we are supposed to learn from the screenplay, was a realist who under-
stood that in the moment he needed Pétion’s assistance he had no choice
 14  VASCONCELOS AS SCREENWRITER: BOLÍVAR REMEMBERED  385

but to acquiesce to the Haitian president’s demand and proclaim that he

would liberate the enslaved. Vasconcelos, let us say, is “contextualizing”
Bolívar’s words. Haiti, we are told, at this time represented an historical
axis, a strategic place to which Bolívar had to go for military assistance.
With this in mind, we are to see Bolívar’s proclamations to end slavery,
then, as a concession to the political project of the individual funding him
and not a reflection of the true content of his thought. What has happened
to Bolívar’s connection to Haiti? In Bolívar’s May 25, 1825 address to the
Peruvian Congress where he presents for adoption his Bolivian Constitution,
he uses the example of the successful transmission of power from Pétion to
Jean-Pierre Boyer in order to defend the principle of the lifetime president,
a central feature of the constitution. All Peruvians had to do was look to
the example of state formation in Haiti to approve his constitution.
Vasconcelos is calling into question Bolívar’s interest in and commit-
ment to Haiti. Reconstructed, Vasconcelos’s Bolívar who now does not
truly care about manumission will stand not only for the union of church
and state, opposing Juárez in this way, but also for the post-1824 dream
of federation. Readers and viewers, particularly those among Latin
America’s youth, will be able to find in independence the lessons that will
guide them in the future.
But how could Vasconcelos portray the liberal Anglophile, Francophile,
anticlerical, anti-Spanish Bolívar in such a way? How could Bolívar, who
never uttered a single significant public word of criticism against the
United States or England, who in fact admired the civic and political tradi-
tions of the United States and also admired the English parliamentary
system, who contemplated in the mid to late 1820s inviting the English to
act as guardian of the new republics, be seen as an enemy of the United
States and the Anglo world?21 Furthermore, how could this figure, who in
essence stood against the Catholic clergy, except in his final dictatorship
when he sought out their political support, be reconciled not only to
Catholicism, but also to its pomp?
Vasconcelos could do this because of his relativistic understanding of the
relationship between power, tradition, and interpretation. Addressing this
relationship in the prologue, he speaks of his right to fashion his own Bolívar,
one who was not only castizo (pure) and culturally Latin American in the
way he imagines this but also one whose story of development and final
spiritual redemption hinged on the critical knowledge Latin Americans had
gained since the emergence of the United States as hemispheric power.
Indeed, the figure he was presenting, he avowed, is no less an interpretation,
386  R. T. CONN

as he underlines with his inclusion of the word in the title, than the Bolívars
of the French and of the United States. This is significant. For in justifying
his right to produce a Bolívar for the times, in explaining the grounds that
authorizes him to mine the Bolivarian archive for the religious statements
that he would include in his drama, he says nothing of the multiple if not
myriad appropriations of Bolívar in Latin America. Ricardo Palma, José
Martí, José Enrique Rodó, to name just a few of the intellectuals and writers
who positioned themselves through Bolívar (the cases of Palma and Rodó
to be discussed in later chapters), are neatly elided so that the story of
Vasconcelos’s relationship to the “Liberator” can be seen as that of a Latin
American rescuing a foundational figure from foreign hands. Vasconcelos’s
Bolívar is to be an eminently usable one for Latin Americans confronted by
the specter of the new antifascist Pan Americanism, a figure in whose heroic
story may be found all the evidence of Latin America’s spiritual unity as well
as all the evidence of the cause of its continued political fragmentation: the
United Kingdom and the United States.
Most narratives about Bolívar, whether friendly or hostile, take a stand
in one way or another on the merits of his two state projects: on the one
hand, the Gran Colombia of which he was president; on the other, the
Bolivian Constitution together with the Andean Federation, the former
that was to serve as the basis for the latter. In Vasconcelos’s narrative,
although there is a scene that deals with his response to the so-called cal-
umnies directed at him during his dictatorship in 1828 and 1829, the
failure of Bolívar to realize his dream of a federation is not presented as the
result, as it in fact was, of irreconcilable differences between himself and
the Granadan Francisco de Paula Santander, the Venezuelan José Antonio
Páez, and other representatives of so-called local interests. Furthermore,
there is no mention of Bolivia’s ouster of Sucre in 1828 or the war between
Peru and the Gran Colombia. Rather, the failure is seen as the result of
British and US economic and political interests.
Bolívar is portrayed saying the following to one of his secretaries on the
subject of the United Kingdom: “You are wrong, Martel. Behind Páez is
England…. England does not want us to be strong. A collection of disor-
ganized nations is easier to manage for its own interests than a great State
like the one I had imagined.”22
The United Kingdom was, of course, interested in establishing trade
relations with the new independent nations, and did. But its experience
with the Gran Colombia, which defaulted on a loan extended to it in
1824, discouraged investment in the following decades, as did, as John
 14  VASCONCELOS AS SCREENWRITER: BOLÍVAR REMEMBERED  387

Lynch states in his discussion of Bolivia, the market collapse of 1825,

which left British companies unable to work the mines sold to them by the
new government.23
As for the United States, in a scene based upon historical fact but greatly
embellished, we hear Bolívar speaking to his aide-de-camp Florencio
O’Leary about the US thwarting of efforts by Mexico and the Gran
Colombia to liberate Cuba:

Let us speak clearly, O’Leary; what is getting in my way is the ambition of

foreigners…. In these moments the failure of Cuba hurts me most. The
expedition that should have freed it was ready; Colombia offered the largest
contingent; Mexico was also quick to assist. And who impeded us? The
United States! Why is this country opposed to the liberation of Cuba?24

Henry Clay did make a statement in 1825 expressing the United States’
opposition to the Mexican-Colombian alliance for Cuban liberation. Still,
as Hugh Thomas, a British historian who was a figure not unlike Salvador
de Madariaga and Waldo Frank—an intellectual who took advantage of
Pan Americanism to produce countless mega narratives explaining to a
British and US and international audience the Hispanic and Latin American
world—writes in his history of Cuba: Had Bolívar truly desired to take the
liberation process to Cuba under the command of Páez in collaboration
with Cuban exiles in Mexico, supported by that country’s president (as he
threatened to do after the battle of Ayacucho in order to compel a com-
plete surrender by the Spanish) Clay’s statement would not have deterred
him. At the same time, nor was it likely, Thomas adds, that the US public
would have supported a military effort against Bolívar’s army.25
In Vasconcelos’s revised version of the Bolivarian epic, the internal dif-
ferences between Bolívar, Santander, and Páez are presented as being
merely contingent. The “Liberator” explains to O’Leary that those who
believe themselves to be his rivals will bow their heads to him if he is able
to establish a federation of “pueblos Americanos” (American peoples)
including all of Latin America, not just Venezuela, New Granada (present-­
day Colombia), Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. Yet if the importance of the
conflict with Santander and Páez is downplayed in this way, the ethnic
identities of Anglo/Irish and Hispanic are described as being transcendent.
In a scene in Quito in 1822, O’Leary, who collected and organized
Bolívar’s correspondence and who in his biography defended him against
his detractors and enemies as a liberal, Enlightenment figure, is portrayed
388  R. T. CONN

exchanging disparaging remarks about the creole Bolívar with an agent of

the British Secret Service. O’Leary, referred to in the stage directions of
this scene alone as the Irishman, attributes the success of the indepen-
dence movement to the participation of English and Irish recruits and
mercenaries who like him joined the movement beginning in 1817. For
his part, the agent tells him not to worry about defending British com-
mercial interests, for Chile’s hero of independence, Bernardo O’Higgins,
“another one of ours, has the command of the Chilean fleet. England will
not relinquish the pursuit of its quarry. Ha, Ha, Ha.”26
It is true, of course, that O’Leary would serve as British consul general
in Venezuela and Colombia after Bolívar’s death and the break-up of the
Gran Colombia, just as another Bolívar aide-de-camp, the British Belford
Hinton Wilson, would in Peru. Following this scene, indeed neatly juxta-
posed to it, is that of the famous unrecorded meeting in Guayaquil in
1822 between Bolívar and the Argentine Liberator San Martín, after
which San Martín ceded authority to Bolívar over the liberation of Peru
and then left South America to retire in France. Here, in a portrayal of
trust, agreement, and unity—rather than, possibly, as many conjecture, of
power politics—San Martín is represented as willingly agreeing to with-
draw from the campaign, and subsequently, as accompanying Bolívar
together with their respective staffs for drinks and dancing. With this,
Vasconcelos seems to resolve the enigma of San Martín’s surprising
removal of himself from the independence movement, shunting aside the
contention of Argentines that Bolívar threatened to withhold his forces
from the conflict in Peru if San Martín did not cede his command to him.
Vasconcelos may also be seen in this same gesture to erase from view the
critical tension regarding the matter of the political future of Guayaquil,
which Bolívar declared to be part of the Gran Colombia but which many
in the local elites wanted either to be part of Peru or to be independent.
As for Vasconcelos’s conception of history, the following, then, can be
said: By supplying an “updated” version of O’Leary and O’Higgins, by
“revealing” them to be part of a vast conspiracy of British capitalist inter-
ests, a providential, positivist Vasconcelos furnishes readers of his screen-
play, if not perhaps one day viewers of his film, with a new mythical vision
of cooperation among Latin America’s liberators based on the fictions of
racial coherence and difference.
The screenplay Juarez was based on Franz Werfel’s 1924 play Juarez
und Maximilian, translated into English in 1926 and performed that
same year at the Theater Guild in New  York City. In the play, Werfel,
 14  VASCONCELOS AS SCREENWRITER: BOLÍVAR REMEMBERED  389

himself Austrian, portrays the Austrian Habsburg prince Maximilian as an

enlightened aristocrat who, combating the demagogue of democracy that
is Juárez, defends till the end of his life his vision of a radical constitutional
monarchy. As Vanderwood points out, Aeneas MacKenzie, in the first
Warner Bros. adaptation, brought about two important changes. He pres-
ents Juárez as a Zapotec Indian who is intellectually inferior on account of
his “race”; also, to meet the interpretive needs of Warner Bros., he replaces
the climax of the original play, in which Maximilian lashes out against the
new tyranny represented by Juárez, with a different climactic moment, the
evacuation of French troops under threat of US intervention, the signifi-
cance of which the primitive Juárez does not entirely grasp. In the second
adaptation, prompted by the agreement between Roosevelt and Warner
Bros., MacKenzie, now in collaboration with John Huston, rewrites the
role of Juárez in order to define him as a bearer of Pan American values.
To this end, Juárez is presented as a Lincolnphile, and a personal relation-
ship that never existed between the two is invented. Thus there is a por-
trait of Lincoln hanging behind Juárez’s desk in the moments of the film
in which Juárez appears presiding over his government-in-exile; a scene in
which Juárez is presented receiving a letter of support from Lincoln; and
a scene where we witness the Mexican president-in-exile receiving with
great sorrow news of the US president’s death. In the second script,
Juárez is thus transformed from racialized Indian to a New Deal
Lincolnesque figure representing liberalism and a democratic hemisphere.
No doubt Vasconcelos, who vilified Juárez as being unable to assimilate to
Hispanic culture on account of his “Indianness,” would have preferred
the racialized portrayal of his historical nemesis. But the second and final
script would have also appealed to him, for therein could be found the
“truth” of which he sought to convince his compatriots—Juárez’s identi-
fication with the United States.
The Monroe Doctrine is also emphasized in the final screenplay. Louis-
Napoleon Bonaparte (Napoleon III) and his ministers are portrayed speak-
ing of the need to show the United States that France is not in violation of
it. At the beginning of the film we see them plotting to protect themselves
from accusations by staging a referendum for the Mexican people on
whether they want to have the Austrian Habsburg Maximilian as their king.
Equally significant is the scene toward the end of the film that Warner Bros.
deleted from the Mexican version after reaction from Latin American view-
ers at the opening in New York.27 Here we are shown a US envoy who is
sent, subsequent to the Union’s defeat of the Confederates, to visit Louis-
390  R. T. CONN

Napoleon to inform him that the United States takes the Monroe Doctrine
very seriously and is poised to support Juárez. As the British historian
Jasper Ridley tells us, with the end of the Civil War, the United States no
longer needed to tolerate the occupation since it had done so principally to
secure from France assurances that it would not sell naval vessels to the
Confederacy. But, as Ridley also tells us, the United States, which was sup-
plying Juárez’s army and was concerned about violence on the border, did
not put pressure on Louis-Napoleon, who already wanted to evacuate his
troops from Mexico and was desperate to save face before his own public,
outraged by the expense of the occupation. A meeting did, indeed, take
place between Louis-Napoleon and a US envoy, but this envoy was James
Watson Webb, a friend whom Louis-Napoleon called upon to advise him.
The meeting initially had nothing to do with the Monroe Doctrine. To the
contrary, Louis-Napoleon asked Webb if the United States would help him
politically by recognizing Maximilian. To which the envoy, now alluding to
the doctrine, responded that public opinion prevented President Andrew
Johnson from doing so and that such was the sentiment of the American
people that in the event of a continued occupation there could be thou-
sands going to Mexico to fight for Juárez. He “suggested that Louis-
Napoleon might consider withdrawing his troops from Mexico in stages
over eighteen months, for this would make it clear to the world that he was
withdrawing in his own good time and not under duress.”28
Non-Hispanic US viewers of the film, it would be reasonable to think,
would have lacked the critical knowledge to question a version of Mexican
history in which the United States is presented as the linchpin of indepen-
dence from the French. Furthermore, Pan Americanists—cultural hege-
monists that they were—whether consciously or unconsciously, would
have perceived US prerogative over Mexico and the rest of Latin America,
as embodied by the Monroe Doctrine, as correct and natural. It was, of
course, another matter for viewers in Mexico, who, as Vanderwood tells
us, saw in the film the same old story of US paternalism and intervention-
ism in Latin America.29 For Vasconcelos, who considered launching a mili-
tary assault from US territory on the socialist president Lázaro Cárdenas
in the years before his expulsion, that story of interference would have
included the fraudulent elections of 1929 to which he saw the Left-leaning
Cárdenas as heir.
Vasconcelos’s desire to celebrate the continental figure of Simón Bolívar
along with national figures such as Francisco Madero, executed together
with his vice president by General Victoriano Huerta, and Lucas Alamán,
 14  VASCONCELOS AS SCREENWRITER: BOLÍVAR REMEMBERED  391

on the big screen to compete with Warner Bros. made sense for one such
as himself who understood all forms of culture as a form of propaganda.
In this, his last major attempt at redirecting Mexican politics, the race
theory he embraced from the 1920s forward aligned him with other Latin
American race thinkers like Vallenilla Lanz. But such are the vagaries of
memory and the politics of culture that the Vasconcelos of the 1930s and
1940s would not be the one remembered. Instead, that one would be the
Vasconcelos of “La raza cósmica,” celebrated by later generations for his
clear statement of opposition to US racial political hegemony and at the
same time domesticated on both sides of the border, whether by the likes
of the Mexican writer and essayist Alfonso Reyes, the Chicano movement,
or US and Mexican textbook writers, as a voice attesting to the successful
and exemplary racial mixing of indigenous and Spanish white.
This exclusive focus on the figure of the 1920s is significant because it
leaves out earlier and later moments in the story of this major figure’s
engagement with ideology and culture, in particular the important transi-
tional moment examined here ending a ten-year exile that saw Vasconcelos
go from Mexico to the United States, then to Spain and Argentina, later
back to the United States, and finally back to Mexico. Vasconcelos fought
on many political and cultural fronts, including the celluloid front of the
late 1930s, while using the very border that he and other Mexican intel-
lectuals and politicians crossed so often to distinguish what was Mexican
or Latin American from what was (US) American. The Latin American
cinema he imagined has still not come into being, and ironically, at the
time he was writing, Mexico was entering its cinematic Golden Age. But
in the end, no text or texts of Vasconcelos speaks more eloquently than
does Simón Bolívar (Interpretación) together with its prologue to what
was of most importance to Vasconcelos throughout his long and embat-
tled career: the creation of a political and cultural consciousness capable of
resisting what he saw as the assaults of the “powerful,” which for him was
first and foremost the United States. In his response to Juarez, a motion
picture in the service of the US state, we see a vision that is self-consciously
propagandistic, presented in the universalistic language of high culture,
the same language in which he inscribes all his distinct projects rallying
both the elites and the masses. We also see an intellectual who was both a
realist and an idealist, waging his celluloid war in the print medium to
which he had access but hopeful that his words and images would one day
become something more despite his statements of skepticism in the pro-
logue to the contrary.
392  R. T. CONN

Bolívar would remain alive in the Mexican tradition, particularly in the

plastic arts, where, as Gustavo Vargas Martínez Fuente explains, he became
an important icon thanks to Vasconcelos.30 In print, one appearance of his
figure is noteworthy, an extension of Vasconcelos’s vision of Bolívar as
Latin American caudillo and/or charismatic leader but presented now in a
new binary in which Bolívar is made to stand as one of two definitions of
the caudillo.
The individual who formulated the binary was writer and essayist Octavio
Paz in his 1969 essay, “Crítica de la pirámide” (“Critique of the Pyramid”)31
Paz, who stood opposed to nationalists like Vasconcelos, had earlier brought
out El laberinto de la soledad (The Labyrinth of Solitude), his famous series
of essays of 1950 in which he seeks to sweep away the class-and race-based
oppositional politics of rivals through his well-known sociology- and arche-
type-driven reflections on power. His goal was to create institutions to
combat the logic of personal domination he saw everywhere.32 But in his
1969 essay Paz attacks not Mexican society per se but the party that domi-
nated the country for 40 years and that would for another 30 years, the
Partido Revolucionario Institucional, for its role in the October 2, 1968
massacre of students and workers as ordered by Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, the
PRI president at the time. In a sleight-of-hand that could be seen as a new
version of blame the victim, Paz condemns not only the all-powerful party,
the first public attack of its kind, as scholars have pointed out, but also
Mexicans writ large, whom Paz asks to take responsibility for the violence
of the state—heirs, as he argues through Freud, to a collective history of
violence going back to the Aztecs and the colonization process. Using the
same critical paradigm he develops in El laberinto de la soledad—that of
Mexican modernity as having two subject positions, that of the powerful
and that of the powerless—Paz writes of a Mexico descended morally from
the country’s original communities’ centuries-long internalization of the
power inequalities thrust upon them first by the Aztec state, then by the
Spanish colonial state that replaced the Aztec.
Paz, it is clear, was Othering the Aztecs, who in recent decades had
been elevated to represent national culture, as seen in the place they were
made to occupy in the new National Museum of Anthropology, opened
in 1964. As for the student leaders killed and imprisoned at the hands of
the PRI in 1968, together with the student and worker movements in
which Mexico’s 1968 had its origins, detailed by Elena Poniatowska in
her book, La Noche de Tlatelolco, The Night of Tlatelolco, they are barely
spoken of, the importance of their critique minimized by the purported
 14  VASCONCELOS AS SCREENWRITER: BOLÍVAR REMEMBERED  393

conditions under which they made it. The students became subjects exist-
ing outside society by virtue of their location in the university—not being
of society—a tremendous statement to make given that protest in 1968
was centered at the Autonomous University of Mexico.
Paz does critique the PRI, presenting the figure of its president in the
1960s as embodying what he posits as a Mexican iteration of the archetype
of the caudillo, the figure whose authority exists in the law. To this
­archetype he opposes that of what he defines as the Latin American caudi-
llo as represented not only by Vasconcelos, but also by Bolívar, the
Argentines Manuel Rosas and Juan Perón as well as the Cuban Fidel
Castro, leaders who define their authority through their individual acts.
Benito Juárez and Venustiano Carranza fall under the rubric of the caudi-
llo whose authority is based in the law; Santa Anna and Pancho Villa under
that of the caudillo whose authority is not.33
Paz, who throughout his career used the concept of archetypes and
dualities as a way of framing his critiques, deploys these two forms of lead-
ership to narrate modern Mexican history. As if they were the only possi-
bilities for Mexico in the years after the Revolution, Paz retells the political
history of Mexico through their lenses, writing that the PRI, founded as
the PNR in 1929 by Plutarco Elías Calles to legitimize his extralegal
authority as jefe máximo—any mention of the 1929 elections that saw
Vasconcelos, the embodiment for him of the other archetype, left out—
had functioned well until the late 1950s. At that time, however, it began
to become increasingly rigid, its possibility for moral action, Paz submits,
undermined by its own suffocating concern with form, hierarchy, and
power, the office of the president of the PRI congealing by 1968 into the
embodiment of the severest form of the Mexican lawful caudillo, the Aztec
Tlataoni. In another instance of Othering, Paz is barbarizing the Aztec
leader, presenting him through the filter of the PRI as a mindless and
heartless institutional figure. The other form of leadership with its cast of
figures who include enemies of liberalism provides Paz with a counter-
point against which to bring into relief and celebrate certain Mexican lead-
ers, particularly Carranza and Calles, all this at the same time as part of his
effort to keep on course the political model put in place by the latter in
1929, a model he in the end defends but likens in its contemporary
embodiment to fascism and the violence of the Aztec state and that he
argues requires not a wholesale rejection but critique.
394  R. T. CONN

Notes
1. Brian S. McBeth, “Foreign Support for Venezuelan Political Exiles During
the Regime of Juan Vicente Gómez: The Case of Mexico, 1923–1933,”
The Historian, 2007, 69, no. 2: 275–304.
2. Homenaje a Bolívar en el primer centenario de su muerte, 1830–1930
(Mexico: Secretaria de Relaciones Exteriores, 1931), 26–27.
3. Ibid., 38–55.
4. Ibid., 85.
5. Ibid., 82–83.
6. “Una mirada sobre la América española,” April to June, 1829, in Simon
Bolívar: Doctrina del Libertador (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1994),
240–241. “Un bárbaro de las costas del Sur, vil aborto de una india salvaje
y de un feroz africano, sube al puesto supremo por sobre mil cadáveres y a
costa de veinte millones arrancados de la propiedad.” “A barbarian from
the coasts of the South, a vile monstrosity born of a savage Indian mother
and a ferocious African, ascends to the highest office stepping over a 1000
cadavers and at the cost of 20 million in property losses.”
7. Ramón Valle, 1885, Bolívar e Iturbide en el centenario de ambos heroes
(México: Imprenta de Gonzalo A. Esteva, 1885).
8. See Gustavo Vargas Martínez, Presencia de Bolívar en la cultura mexicana
(México: Universidad Nacional de México, 2005).
9. José Vasconcelos, “Bolivarismo y Monroísmo (Temas Iberoamericanos),”
Obras completas. Vol. 2 (Mexico: Libreros Mexicanos Unidos, 1957),
1305–1494.
10. Warner Bros., Juárez,
11. José Vasconcelos, “Bolivarismo y Monroísmo (Temas Iberoamericanos),”
1957. Obras completas. Vol. 2. Mexico: Librervasconcelosos Mexicanos
Unidos. 1305–1494.
12. See the website “Presencia de Bolívar en la cultura mexicana. Iconografía
mexicana sobre Bolívar” by Gustavo Vargas Martínez Fuente who provides
a history of portraits of Bolívar and in the plastic arts more generally from
the 1920s to 1998: http://www.pacarinadelsur.com/home/pielago-de-
imagenes/350-presencia-de-bolivar-en-la-cultura-mexicana-iconografia-
mexi.
13. I will be referring primarily to Vanderwood’s Spanish-language essay, “La
imagen de los héroes mexicanos en las películas americanas” (“The Image
of Mexican Heroes in American Movies”) in México/Estados Unidos:
encuentros y desencuentros en el cine, 1996, Ed. Ignacio Durán, Ivan
Trujillo, and Monica Verea (Mexico: Instituto Mexicano de Cinematografía),
59–83. This is based on the author’s introduction to his edition of the
screenplay, Juarez, 1983 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press), 9–41.
In contrast to his original study, Vanderwood in the later essay attributes
 14  VASCONCELOS AS SCREENWRITER: BOLÍVAR REMEMBERED  395

the last revision of the screenplay to the beginning of FDR’s movement

away from passive isolationism (64–65).
14. Michael E. Birdwell, Celluloid Soldiers: The Warner Bros. Campaign against
Nazism (New York and London: New York University Press, 1999), 35.
15. Ibid., 66–68.
16. Paul Vanderwood, “La imagen de los héroes mexicanos en las películas
americanas” in México/Estados Unidos: encuentros y desencuentros en el cine.
Ed. Ignacio Durán, Ivan Trujillo, and Monica Verea (Mexico: Instituto
Mexicano de Cinematografía, 1996), 68–69.
17. José Vasconcelos, “Bolivarismo y Monroísmo (Temas Iberoamericanos),”
Obras completas. Vol. 2 (Mexico: Libreros Mexicanos Unidos, 1957),
1305–1494. “una encarnación del panamericanismo aun antes de que éste
precisara sus objetivos en congresos.” 1309.
18. Alfonso Taracena, José Vasconcelos (Mexico: Editorial Porrúa, 1982), 121.
19. José Vasconcelos, Simón Bolívar (Interpretación) in Obras completas, Vol.
2. 1721–66 (Mexico: Libreros Mexicanos Unidos, 1957), 1722.
20. See Bosley Crowther, “‘The Life of Símon Bolívar,’ a Mexican-Made Film,
Opens at the Belmont—‘Sarong Girl’ at Palace,” New York Times, 18 June
1943, 11.
21. David Bushnell, “Simón Bolívar and the United States: A Study in
Ambivalence,” Air University Review, 1986, Vol. XXXVII, No. 5 (July–
August): 106–112. As is known, Bolívar in a private letter to the British
chargé d’affaires to Colombia Patrick Campbell, dated August 5, 1829,
wrote: “Can you imagine the opposition that would come from the new
American states, and from the United States, which seems destined by
Providence to plague America with torments in the name of liberty?”
(“Cuánto no se opondrían todos los nuevos Estados americanos, y los
Estados Unidos que parecen destinados por la providencia para plagar
América de miserias en nombre de la libertad”). There is an important
debate about the significance of the second part of the sentence, which has
often been excerpted, particularly in Latin America since the 1960s, to
show Bolívar to have been a critic avant-la-lettre of US imperialism. The
Bolívar scholar David Bushnell submits that Bolívar penned these words to
curry favor with the United Kingdom, with which he desired to foster polit-
ical and economic relations rather than with the United States. Bushnell
writes: “Those who make much of that quotation seldom mention, if they
are even aware, the context in which it was uttered. Instead, they commonly
imply that Bolívar was foresightedly warning against the later machination
of the Central Intelligence Agency in Chile or the not-so-covert struggle of
the Reagan administration against revolutionary Nicaragua. In reality,
Bolívar’s statement is contained in a letter to the British chargé in Bogotá––
Harrison’s counterpart and diplomatic rival––whose favor Bolívar at the
time was ardently seeking, and the principal “torment” involved was noth-
ing but the conventional republicanism that US agents throughout Latin
396  R. T. CONN

America were then promoting in opposition both to the diplomatic and

ideological influence of Great Britain and to the protomonarchist schemes
associated with Bolívar and his supporters (These agents’ methods often
entailed blunt and brazen meddling in Latin American affairs, but their
immediate objectives were essentially innocuous).”
22. José Vasconcelos, 1957, Simón Bolívar (Interpretación) in Obras completas,
Vol. 2 (Mexico: Libreros Mexicanos Unidos, 1721–66). “Te equivocas, Martel.
Detrás de Páez está Inglaterra…. No quiere Inglaterra que seamos fuertes. Una
colección de pueblos desorganizados es más fácil de manejar para sus propios
intereses que un gran Estado como el que había soñado.” 1760.
23. John Lynch, Símon Bolívar: A Life, 205–206.
24. José Vasconcelos, Simón Bolívar (Interpretación) in Obras completas, Vol. 2
(Mexico: Libreros Mexicanos Unidos, 1957), 1721–66. “Hablemos claro,
O’Leary; quien me estorba es la ambición de los extraños…. En estos
instantes lo que más me duele es el fracaso de Cuba. Estaba lista la expe-
dición que debía libertarla; Colombia ofrecía el mayor contingente; México
también estaba pronto a ayudar. Y ¿quién nos lo impidió? ¡Los Estados
Unidos! ¿Por qué se oponen a la liberación de Cuba?” 1752.
25. Hugh Thomas, Cuba: The Pursuit of Freedom (New York: Harper and
Row, 1971), 104–105.
26. José Vasconcelos, 1957, Simón Bolívar (Interpretación). “otro de los
nuestros, tiene el mando de la escuadra chilena. Inglaterra no abandona su
presa. Ja, Ja, Ja.” 1744.
27. Paul Vanderwood, Juárez (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983),
9–41. Vanderwood discusses the reception of Juárez in New  York and
Latin America between 1939 and the early 1940s.
28. Jasper Ridley, Maximilian and Juárez (London: Phoenix Press, 1992),
239.
29. For another view of the film in relation to Mexican cultural developments
in the 1940s, see Seth Fein 171–72, who speaks of the negative response
to Juárez in Mexico among both the elites and the masses as an early
instance of the US-Mexican pact that he sees developing at the time and
that will strengthen, he argues, through the war and the postwar. If Juarez,
with its “failure” in Mexico, stands for an ideological pact in formation,
later films of the war period and of the cinematic Golden Age successfully
perform the ideological work of the state linking Mexico to the United
States.
30. Gustavo Vargas Martínez, Presencia de Bolívar en la cultura Mexicana.
31. Octavio Paz, Posdata; Crítica de la pirámide (México: Siglo XX
Editores, 1970).
32. Octavio Paz, El laberinto de la solead y otros ensayos (New York: Penguin,
1997).
33. Octavio Paz, Posdata; Crítica de la pirámide, 276.
 CHAPTER 15

Bolívar in Bolivia: On Fathers and Creators

In the nation that paid tribute to Bolívar by taking his name, first as the
República de Bolívar, then as Bolivia, the battle to define his meaning for
the present has occurred against many backdrops, including liberalism and
constitutionalism, militarism, race thinking, Pan Americanism, Venezuela-­
centered Bolivarianism, socialist politics, the Cold War, populist move-
ments, and even Mexico’s Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI). In
the nineteenth century, there was much interest in Bolívar, at the same
time that national figures were celebrated. They ranged from Pedro
Domingo Murillo, who led the Bolivian independence movement and was
executed in 1810, to Casimiro Olañeta, a royalist who was secretary to his
infamous father but who went on to join the army of Antonio José de
Sucre and become an important legislator and minister in the Bolivian
republic, to José Ballivián, the general who defeated Peru in 1841.1 The
year 1883 saw celebrations of Bolívar across the Americas. Bolivians paid
tribute to Bolívar in La Paz, but they also traveled to Caracas to participate
in the Bolívar spectacle mounted by Antonio Guzmán Blanco and to
Buenos Aires, where they saluted Bolívar and San Martín. As he was in
Venezuela, Bolívar for some was father of the nation. In the 1890s, as we
mentioned in an earlier chapter, Bolivians sought to recover from Ecuador
the remains of Sucre in anticipation of the centenary of his birth in 1898.
Sucre also was iconic.

© The Author(s) 2020 397

R. T. Conn, Bolívar’s Afterlife in the Americas,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26218-1_15
398  R. T. CONN

At the beginning of the twentieth century, during the centennial decades

of independence (the teens and 20s), propelled by a new socioeconomic
order grounded in tin production, writers and intellectuals, ever more con-
scious of themselves as a distinct class in a Bolivia modernizing on the heels
of the 1899 civil war that had resulted in the establishment of La Paz as a
second capital, took up the pen to reflect on the received meanings of
Bolívar, determined to use him and other historical figures, most impor-
tantly including Antonio José de Sucre, to build a national tradition that
would support their vision of a nation state. As such, they put into circula-
tion a logic that continues to this day, one that revolves around the debate
as to whether to privilege as creator or founder of the nation Bolívar or
Sucre, the latter who presided over the liberation of Alto Peru (Upper Peru)
in 1825, called a congress, acting as Bolívar’s surrogate, and who succeeded
Bolívar as president before being driven out. In this chapter, we examine
how Bolivian intellectuals and writers have positioned themselves before this
dyad as they have responded to and shaped their political projects from the
centenary decades of the 1910s and 1920s through the period of the
National Revolutionary Movement of the 1950s and early 1960s and the
Hugo Bánzer government of the 1970s, and finally, up to the present.
No individual provides a clearer window into the new cultural nationalist
movement of the 1910s and 1920s than Marcos Beltrán Ávila, who in 1924
republished as a single collection a series of book review essays with the aim
of registering, affirming, and critiquing the work of Bolivia’s new historians.
The book, Ensayos de crítica histórica al margen de algunos libros bolivianos
(Essays of Historical Criticism in the Margin of Some Bolivian Books), was
brought out in Oruro, which in the twentieth century had become the cen-
ter of the new tin industry, home to Simón Patiño and his son Antenor, the
best known Bolivian tin barons. Assuming the role of mediator and arbiter
of this never-seen-before spate of writing within the emerging field, Beltrán
Ávila passes judgment on individual works while encouraging Bolivians to
give up their purportedly immature attachment to their understanding of
the world based on the concept of the future and to become students of
Bolivian history. Reflecting on the past, though, cannot be done just any
way but must be performed in a professional manner, carried out such as to
avoid fetishizing the local, he insists, as an historian of the well-known upris-
ing in 1771 in Oruro purportedly has, but to see Bolivia as a whole having
a corresponding, non-fragmented history for the professional to tell and
make known. History has to be narrated from the perspective of the state.2
Bolívar and Sucre are the primary objects of Beltrán Ávila’s attention.
They are fraught with distortion, he tells us, as he explains his goal to cre-
 15  BOLÍVAR IN BOLIVIA: ON FATHERS AND CREATORS  399

ate an historical tradition that moves beyond the purportedly subjective

logic that has resulted in detractors and champions of the two. He is after
the objectivity of evidence concerning: whether Bolívar’s Colombian
forces under the leadership of Sucre entered La Paz without the consent
of Bolivians; whether they in fact trampled the city; whether Sucre should
be credited with being creator of the nation for the key role he played in
overseeing the defeat of the Spanish, in establishing the Asamblea
Deliberante, and for his presidencies—or if Bolívar should be; further-
more, whether Bolívar should be criticized for his plan to incorporate
Bolivia into his Federation of the Andes; and whether Bolivians betrayed
Bolívar when they ousted Sucre in 1828.
Presenting himself as the careful judge whose role is to dispel error, no
matter the political stakes, Beltrán Ávila singles out for his judicious reflec-
tion the moment in 1828 that Bolivians forced Sucre to resign his position
as president. Pointing to Bolívar’s diminishing authority since 1826, he
insists that this act on the part of Bolivians must be seen in the context of
the widespread opposition to Bolívar that had arisen in all the territories
he liberated, most significantly in the Gran Colombia. Why then, Beltrán
Ávila asks, have Bolivians been targeted when Peru, Venezuela, and
Colombia also rejected or expelled Bolívar and when Quito (Ecuador)
seceded from the Gran Colombia before his death?
The answer at which he arrives is simple. Owing to the effect on the
national psychology of intellectual history as it had been written up to the
moment, and for no good reason other than the fact that they have no
alternative explanation, Bolivians internalized the Venezuelan version of
Bolívar’s epic story and writings. They find no fault with Venezuelan elites,
not even mentioning the fact that Venezuelans exiled Bolívar, but allow
themselves to be castigated. Bolivian historians, whose work he is review-
ing, are well on their way to producing a corrective to this, he states hap-
pily, creating “chronologies of events” that are national, with the result
that Bolivians now have the possibility of seeing themselves as they are,
neither as victims of Bolívar nor as aggressors against him.3
Beltrán Ávila’s publication came out on the heels of several texts that
inaugurated the Sucre revival and that were part and parcel of Bolivia’s
new cultural nationalism. One of these was a 1918 collection of Sucre let-
ters that had been in the possession of a Colombian general named León
Galindo who had fought at Ayacucho and who had decided to remain in
Bolivia to live. The general’s grandson brought these letters out in the
hopes of establishing Sucre as Bolivia’s first citizen.4
400  R. T. CONN

Another was Sabino Pinilla’s 1917 La creación de Bolivia (Creation of

Bolivia), one of the works that Beltrán Ávila passes judgment on, and
which would become a cornerstone of Sucre-based republican, constitu-
tionalist narratives.5 Pinilla, who was a Bolivian statesman and who com-
pleted the work in 1875, describes Sucre as a figure who allowed Bolivians
to establish a constitutional tradition. He also affirms the invasion of
Peruvians in 1828 to remove the occupying Colombian forces, including
Sucre who is famously injured in the military assault, as necessary and
understandable. Having lived under the same jurisdictions with peruanos
during colonial times, the altoperuanos “believed that the intervention was
natural because such had occurred 100 times during the colonial period.”6
But the second time Peru invaded Bolivia, in 1841, Bolivians organized
under the leadership of General Ballivián and “the government found
itself surrounded by all the Bolivians who pledged to die rather than allow
the invasion.”7
La creación de Bolivia is of interest not only because of the position it
came to occupy as a new beginning in the reflection on Sucre and Bolívar,
but also because Pinilla was not the one to publish the work. He died in
1908 before he had the opportunity to bring it out. The individual who
arranged for publication was none other than the race writer and historian
Alcides Arguedas, who in 1909 had authored the controversial book El
pueblo enfermo, contribución a la psicoolgía de los pueblos hispano-­americanos
(An Ailing People, a Contribution to the Psychology of the Hispano-American
Peoples), a work that posited that Latin America was sickly because its racial
heritage was mixed.8
The work did not go unchallenged. Progressive writer and intellectual
Franz Tamayo responded the following year, in 1910, in a spate of incisive
newspaper pieces on the question of race, education, immigration, and
nation formation. In these reflections, Tamayo organizes a defense of the
Bolivian indigenous as a highly moral people in comparison to whites,
explains that Bolivian white racism was the product of that race’s knowl-
edge of the inevitability of its decline and marginalization, and encourages
whites to mix with Indians. In one important instance he celebrates the
indigenous by using the positivist terms of the day, privileging industry
over letters and Rome over Greece. Tamayo writes:

Because the Indian is not and probably has never been what we ridiculously
call an intellectual, and let us say while we are at it, what constitutes today
the most repugnant form of South American laziness. Going by the law of
 15  BOLÍVAR IN BOLIVIA: ON FATHERS AND CREATORS  401

inductive probability, cast your gaze among Indians and you will never find
men of letters in the modern sense, professional poets (what a c­ ontradiction),
thinkers on the payroll, salaried philosophers, and that sickly species of intel-
lectualism that is the most irrefutable sign of European degeneration. What
one can find in the Indian, retrospectively, are perhaps strategists, legislators,
engineers (the great Incan entrances comparable today only to the great
works of the Suez, of the Simplon, or of the Nile, and which surpass similar
ones of the Romans), prophets perhaps, builders of empires, directors of
races, nothing more, nothing less, or maybe a little more. You will find in
the Indian soul something of Roman simplicity and greatness, something of
the Sesostrian spirit, but never the histrionics of decadent Grecians or the
hedonism of Byzantine wharves. That does not exist in the Indian of today
or in that of yesterday, and it is precisely in this way that her/his humanity
differs from that of the historic civilization that came into being in the
Mediterranean basin.9

The indigenous were the bearers of modernity, of the values that would
allow Bolivia to advance, Tamayo affirms. Arguedas hardly backed away
from his views in subsequent years, to the contrary, publishing in 1919 his
second novel, La raza de bronce (The Bronze Race),10 a work that was simi-
larly racist, destined to see multiple republications in various Latin
American cities in the decades ahead. And in 1920, continuing to elabo-
rate on his race-based vision, he published the first tome in what would be
a six-volume history of Bolivia. This was La fundación de la República
(1920);11 followed by Historia general de Bolivia (el proceso de la naciona-
lidad) 1809–1821 (1922);12 Historia de Bolivia: Los caudillos letrados, la
confederación Peru-Boliviana, Ingavi; o la consolidación de la nacionali-
dad, 1828–1848 (1923);13 Historia de Bolivia; la plebe en acción (1924);14
La dictadura y la anarquía: 1857–1864 (1926);15 and Los caudillos bár-
baros, historia—resurrección. —La tragedia de un pueblo (Melgarejo—
Morales) 1864–1872 (1929).16 These works target the cholo or mestizo class
in an effort to shore up the authority of the Bolivian white elite, continu-
ing the project laid out in Pueblo enfermo.17
The positivist, Arguedas, whom we must address at the same time we
do Pinilla, was now laboring both in and against the Sucre revival he
helped launch, his goal being to use race theory to argue for authoritarian
government in a way not unlike Laureano Vallenilla Lanz did at the same
time in Venezuela.
Vallenilla Lanz sought to keep the white elite from occupying power by
arguing for the need for a caudillo. Arguedas sought to exclude the emerg-
402  R. T. CONN

ing cholo (or mixed race) class and also assert that a caudillo was needed.
The pair of Sucre and Bolívar became the vehicle for his defense of author-
itarianism and attack on republicanism. In La fundación de la república
(The Foundation of the Republic), he argues that in Bolivia caudillismo, his
direct object of inquiry, is not the result of the absence of a constitutional,
legal tradition but rather the effect of a cholo class incapable of defending
and embodying modernity, prisoner to a racial heritage that is purportedly
decadent. The terms of his critique, indeed, are similar to those of Vallenilla
Lanz who declared that the constitutional tradition is nothing more than
a paper reality.
Speaking on the relationship between the executive, the legislature, and
Bolivia’s cholo class, as he imagines it, Arguedas asserts that Bolivia can
only have a truly republican and democratic polity by educating that class.
He places Bolívar and Sucre in this, his positivist narrative that portrays
European-­descended whites as superior to other racial groups. Arguedas
presents Bolívar as the first in a succession of caudillos who in the chaotic
years following independence are able to run roughshod over legislators
and the people. But, curiously, if Bolívar does this—and it is hardly clear
that this was the case—Arguedas uses the story as ammunition not to cri-
tique Bolívar’s relationship to power but rather, in an example of blame
the victim, to denounce the cholo class whose alleged ineptitude permits
the leader to have his way. As for Sucre, the view put forward of him is also
based on race and positivism’s attack on constitutionalism.
Seeking to undo Sucre’s new constitutional legacy for Bolivia, Arguedas
labels the mariscal an ineffective executive. The issue is not his leadership
abilities, of which he had many, Arguedas tells us, but the fact that as the
legal appointee of Bolívar in his first presidency (late December 1825 to
May 1826), before he was the elected president (May 1826–1828), he was
not a free and autonomous political agent, as became particularly appar-
ent, according to Arguedas, when Sucre sought to choose courses of
action different from those advocated by Bolívar. One moment that
Arguedas focuses upon is of particular relevance: the directive Bolívar
issued to the Congress of Alto Peru requesting that it refrain from decid-
ing on declaring nationhood until the Congresses of Peru and of Río de la
Plata decided if they would claim the territory under the legal concept of
uti possedetis, both entities having possessed Alto Peru previously.18 Sucre
accepts the directive, bemoans Arguedas, lacking the authority to chal-
lenge such orders by virtue of a political structure in which he was a de
facto stand-in. In contrast, the congress, representative of the nation as it
was, was fully authorized. Stating this, Arguedas takes his attack to another
 15  BOLÍVAR IN BOLIVIA: ON FATHERS AND CREATORS  403

level, accusing the congress of unnecessarily awaiting the deliberations of

these two bodies and describing the decision of the congress to proceed in
this manner as an act of obedience exemplifying “indigenous cowardice
and Iberian caprice,” a racial characterization he repeatedly turns to in
order to argue that Bolivians because of their growing cholo intermediary
class cannot be trusted to “embody” a republican democratic government.19
That vision of the congress stands in opposition to that of Sabino Pinilla
who, documenting the reflections of individual deputies of Alto Peru’s
first congress, demonstrates how in a reasoned and informed manner they
came to the conclusion that the region must be an independent nation,
Argentina and Alto Peru, as proclaimed by a member of that congress by
the last name of Serrano, “separating like two sisters who must take care
of their own families, affirming forever a sincere friendship and desire of
mutual friendship.”20
That Arguedas, who sought to give Bolivian white racism a new insti-
tutional anchor to refute the work of Tamayo, arguing that the national
issue was educating a particular social class, constitutionalism and democ-
racy not being sufficient, would want to publish Sabino Pinilla’s work
requires comment. In the prologue, Arguedas tells us that he discovered
the incomplete manuscript among the deceased statesman’s papers. He
was pleased to have pursued publication of it for a series directed by the
Venezuelan Rufino Blanco Fombona, who from his exilic location in Spain
had just launched his publishing house, Editorial-America, and one of its
many series, Biblioteca Ayacucho, which featured so-called representative
works of Latin America. But, curiously, as we might anticipate, the fact
that he saved the text from oblivion or at least from momentary oblivion
and secured for it a distinguished place of publication did not mean he was
in agreement with Pinilla’s view on Sucre. On the contrary, he states
emphatically in the prologue that Pinilla was wrong to have celebrated the
hero of Pichincha and Ayacucho at the expense of Bolívar, wrongly con-
cluding, like René-Moreno, “that the ‘true creator of Bolivia was the
grand marshal of Ayacucho.’”21
All of which begs the question: Why did he bring out a work with
which he disagreed, never mind a work that in print could become, as it in
fact did, a foundational text for the Sucre revival? Motivating him, we can
speculate, may have been his sense of scholarly duty, particularly to an
esteemed older Bolivian statesman of the likes of Pinilla who had recently
passed and whose treatise would fit nicely into a Latin American series that
sought to include works from all of the nations of the continent. Another
404  R. T. CONN

reason may have been Pinilla’s stance on race, which was not so distant
from that of Tamayo and which he wished to polemicize with.
Pinilla argues through nineteenth-century liberalism that the individual
is a function of the social, cultural, and political conditions she lives in.
Provide the Bolivian indigenous with the possibility of living free of a
centuries-old economic system in which they are made to be subservient
to the Spanish—a system to which nineteenth-­century Bolivian elites gave
new life; of having ownership of property; and of having access to educa-
tion with the ability to read and write in the Roman alphabet rather than
their native system of recording, the quipus; and they will thrive, improv-
ing their position in all aspects, including their physical being.22
Another question that interested Arguedas, and which he similarly
would have wished to debate, was Pinilla’s vision of Bolivia’s first con-
gress, which he presents as being highly functional. Here was an opportu-
nity for Arguedas to put into the public sphere a work of interest while at
the same time to polemicize with that work’s liberal agenda. Arguedas
labels Pinilla’s vision utopic, submitting, furthermore, that while he him-
self possessed a method for his work, Pinilla did not. It was positivism
targeting republicanism, the former needing the latter—which Arguedas
also provides in his reconstruction of Pinilla’s text—to make its claims:
Hippolyte Taine in France, Gil Fortoul and Vallenilla Lanz in Venezuela,
Caro in Colombia, Vasconcelos in Mexico, Arguedas in Bolivia.
Still, there is another element for us to consider, one that is as signifi-
cant as the seemingly arbitrary expression of disagreement made in the
prologue about the relative importance of Bolívar and Sucre, and as
weighty as Pinilla’s progressive though Eurocentric view of his country’s
majority indigenous populations. Arguedas made the decision not to
include in the volume he sent to Blanco Fombona the most important
segment of La creación de Bolivia. This was the final part, which deals with
the crucial year of 1828 that saw Peruvians invade, and Sucre, “a victim of
those tendencies, exploded in an army barracks, after having cemented the
institutionalism and effective progress of his adopted country.”23 As the
government would learn when it was apprised of the existence of the
excluded segment, the pages fully supported a republican democratic tra-
dition at the same time that they tore into Bolívar, differentiating him
from Sucre. Pinilla denounces Bolívar, calling him a foreigner who imposes
his Bolivian Constitution. He says that running through the constitution
was the spirit of monarchy, that a great many of the politicians of the revo-
lution of independence embraced a monarchist doctrine, and that all this
stood opposed to the general opinion of the people which was democratic.24
 15  BOLÍVAR IN BOLIVIA: ON FATHERS AND CREATORS  405

The missing segment did, though, reach the public. In 1928, 11 years
later, despite a ban on its publication, it came out. The reason was not that
the positivist Arguedas, who excluded the 130 pages of text, had had a
change of heart. Rather, another individual to whom Pinilla’s brother
entrusted the missing pages and who supported term limits and elections
had managed to have them published subsequent to his return from exile,
right in the middle of the presidency of Hernando Siles Reyes. It was none
other than lawyer, career military officer, and future president Carlos
Blanco Galindo, the same person of whom we spoke earlier, the man who
brought out the Sucre letters in 1918, texts handed down to him by his
grandfather.25
In 1930, under pressure from military leaders who vowed to protect
the constitution, Siles Reyes resigned, having made statements about how
the country needed to be run as a dictatorship and how the constitution
should be amended—code for extending term limits. A military junta
formed and appointed Blanco Galindo as president. Acting, as he saw it,
in accordance with the spirit in which Sucre had acted—a figure who, as
he says in the prologue to his edited volume, was Bolivia’s first citizen
because he was disinterested—Blanco Galindo did not wait long to call
elections. As he promised he would at the time of the military govern-
ment, Bolivia’s 38th president would be no more than a caretaker
president.
The previous years had been littered with constitutional violations and
challenges to the executive. Witness Bautista Saavedra Mallea (1920–1925),
who came to power through a coup against José Gutiérrez Guerra in 1920
and who, after the end of his term in 1925, having supported his succes-
sor, Siles, challenged him, before being forced into exile along with oth-
ers. For Blanco Galindo, the answer to Bolivia’s caudillo and military
excesses was constitutionalism, but in the 1930 junta, Sucre would not be
the only figure bandied about. The liberal-minded military group, with
rival leaders sent into exile, saw to it that the Bolivian Army produced a
justification for the junta. They found it through the Bolivian writer José
A. Deheza who toward the end of 1930 put together a book of some 100
pages to perform the centenary of Bolívar’s death, celebrated across the
Americas, as we have witnessed throughout this book, but that no one
among Bolivia’s eminent historians had thought to recognize.26
Deheza moved into action, assembling tributes from prominent
Bolivians and writing himself pages of prose in which he defended Bolívar,
pages in which he portrayed him as a civic-minded figure who was not
406  R. T. CONN

dictatorial in spirit, in contrast to what Bolivian historians declared.

Deheza gave many proofs of this, paying particular attention to Bolívar’s
well-known reprimand of Sucre for having presided over Bolivia’s first
assembly of February 9, 1825. In the debate over the legality of the meet-
ing, Deheza sought to put Bolívar in a good light, presenting him as the
wise leader who understood that Alto Peru did not have the legal right to
choose its own fate, having to respect the principle of uti possedetis, namely
the wishes of the states born of the viceroyalties of both Peru and the Río
de la Plata. Until those states made their decision, the leaders of Alto Peru
could not make theirs. Bolívar was, Deheza suggests, perhaps, more dem-
ocratic than Sucre, but the worst that could be said, he expostulates, was
that if Bolívar was guilty it was only of respecting the law.27
As for other critiques of Bolívar’s figure, for example, criticism coming
from Peru, Deheza cites Vicente Lecuna’s military history from his 1925
Documentos sobre la creación de Bolivia (Documents about the Creation of
Bolivia) to explain the complexity Bolívar encountered upon entering a
divided Peru, described as being caught in a civil war that was pacified by
Bolívar.28 Bolívar was a dictator, of course, he states, but he was appointed
to that position by legislatures that recognized in him the great man
that he was.29
In addition to citing the narrative of Lecuna, who also tells of how the
armistice he signed with Pablo Morillo in 1821 resulted in many men
going over to the side of Bolívar—an example of Bolívar’s wise
leadership—Deheza goes to additional foreign sources, including the
Argentine intellectual José Ingenieros, who in his 1913 El hombre medio-
cre; ensayo de psicología y moral (Mediocre Man; An Essay on Psychology and
Morality)30 celebrates Bolívar as the person who rises above the vulgar
many who “make of art a profession, of science a business, of philosophy
an instrument, of charity a festivity, of pleasure sensualism,”31 a figure
whose “project of liberation consisted in dignifying peoples, in bringing
about the perfectibility of the human species, through the purity of
democracies, the honest application of the science of practical govern-
ment, the ethical unity of race, moral grandeur, and glory.”32
If the Sucre revival challenged the place of distinction occupied by
Bolívar in the name of constitutionalism, it also occurred in the context of
other new sites for imagining the nation, including most importantly the
League of Nations, established on January 10, 1920. Understanding that
hemispheric politics had done little to assist Bolivia in regaining the terri-
tory lost in the War of the Pacific, Bolivians turned to this, the first world
association, occupying the role of one of the first signatory nations.
 15  BOLÍVAR IN BOLIVIA: ON FATHERS AND CREATORS  407

Tamayo, Bolivia’s most important thinker of the second, third, and fourth
decades of the 1900s, was quick to join the mission that went to Geneva.
Having lived through the War of the Pacific beside his father, a govern-
ment minister at the time, he, like others, saw in the League of Nations the
authority that could finally come to Bolivia’s assistance when regional
organizations had not, having done nothing in his estimation to aid Bolivia
in its quest to recover what it had lost in the War: not only the rich nitrate
deposits of the Atacama desert but the cities of its coast. Bolívar’s much
spoken of Pan American congress was one example of pie-in-the-sky
regional alliances that had never come into being, much less helped the
country. He and others were possessed of optimism similar to that of rep-
resentatives of other small or less powerful nations that regarded the
League of Nations as a political entity that could defend them in disputes
with their more powerful neighbors.
But making claims on the territory of the Atacama desert and the
coastal cities at this late date was complex, if not quixotic, as a previous
Bolivian government in 1903 had accepted payment from Chile for the
territory lost in the War of the Pacific as part of a treaty that included an
agreement that Chile build a railroad from Arica to La Paz. No matter the
ethical or political merit of backing away from a treaty agreed to and acted
on, the principle that no nation should be without access to the sea was
now raised to never-seen-before heights.
The new internationalism represented by the League of Nations for
Bolivia was mirrored in the cultural discourse Tamayo had begun to for-
mulate in response to Alcides Arguedas’s vision of racial hierarchy, his
declared pessimism, and his attack on constitutionalism. Becoming a
Europeanist and classicist through the Latin American movement known
as modernismo, Tamayo organized a vision rooted in northern Europe and
Ancient Greece, cultures from which Bolivia, as he affirmed in his anti-­
Hispanic zeal, could finally develop the spirit of inquiry and work that had
failed to take hold on account of Spanish colonization. The problem, in
the most recent manifestation of that legacy, as he saw it, was that Bolivians
had engaged in progress only superficially, understanding advancement as
occurring through the simple adoption of cultural and scientific models
from Europe rather than through the development, expansion, and revi-
sion of said models. For this Tamayo offered a corrective, one that prom-
ised to permit Bolivians to live their lives in accordance with what he
defined as “energy,” a concept he distilled from his readings of Nietzsche,
Goethe, and the classical philosophers. To the degree Bolivians of all social
408  R. T. CONN

classes and ethnic backgrounds accepted the challenge to cultivate that

energy, they, so he asserts, would acquire the habits of mind and spirit that
would allow them to contribute to the twin towers of science and culture.
But certain conditions derived from positivism with its racial distinctions
and valorization of administration and work over politics also had to be
met in order for modernization to occur.
First, as Tamayo states in his prolific newspaper writings of 1910,
European whites would need to be coaxed to come to Bolivia to lead the
way in establishing the professions, taking the place of their Bolivian coun-
terparts, whom Tamayo describes as useless. Resulting from this white-led
Bolivia would be a new professional body centered in the majority indig-
enous population, incorporated as artisans, skilled laborers, and technicians.
Second, as he asserts in his diplomatic work of the 1920s in relation to
the League of Nations, Bolivia had to regain its access to the sea by recov-
ering the coastal land lost in the War of the Pacific with Chile. Throughout
his writings Tamayo is critical of Bolivia’s historic dependence on mining,
and regards access to the sea, therefore, as necessary to the creation of the
economic opportunities that will permit the building of a modern society.
It is interesting to note, furthermore, that, as was the case of other posi-
tivists for whom the political sphere represented a fallen zone of action,
industry and culture the real motors of society, Tamayo saw politics as
obstructing the institutional practices he sought to bring into being.
Tamayo stood for the body politic. He was working against the race
hierarchies of the day, against a society segmented and defined by the racial
hierarchy brought into existence with colonization and perpetuated with
independence, as well as by the international racist academy at the turn of
the century represented by Arguedas. A progressive, Tamayo took the cat-
egories that were available to him to offer a national vision of an expanded
economy based on Bolivian indigenous occupying the professional sector
of the manual arts, an economy that would purportedly allow for social
progress and transformation. The indigenous were Roman builders.
Tamayo not only wrote using classicism in order to affirm the possi-
bilities for a new more active and inclusive Bolivian citizenry while pro-
ducing a space of knowledge that was new, he also threw himself directly
into politics. Meanwhile Arguedas published volume after volume
denouncing the country’s capacity for self-government and doing this
by turning inside out the Sucre revival that said yes to Bolivian consti-
tutionalism. With the nationalist movement that surged forth after the
 15  BOLÍVAR IN BOLIVIA: ON FATHERS AND CREATORS  409

disaster of the Chaco War of 1932–1935, Bolívar would appear in a new

way in the public sphere. That war, which came to be viewed as having
been stoked by Standard Oil, saw the death of tens of thousands of the
country’s indigenous and poor people, sent by the country’s elite to
protect potential oil reserves in the Chaco region, reserves that in the
end were proven to be nonexistent.33
Tamayo, with his Radical Party, won the presidential elections of 1934
but the military staged a coup against the sitting president, unwilling to be
governed by a political elite that had made the decision to go to war. In
1936 it nationalized Standard Oil, two years before Lázaro Cárdenas nation-
alized the oil industry in Mexico. The old republicanism, severely limited
with its Eurocentric view of the national community, was giving way to a
new kind of politics. Sucre would barely be mentioned in the decades ahead
while the figure of Bolívar, with the birth of the Bolívar Society in 1936,
would become a privileged discursive object in a new world defined by the
political party led by Víctor Paz Estenssoro and Hernán Siles Zuazo called
the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (MNR) (Revolutionary
Nationalist Movement), a party that first came to power in 1943, allied with
a reformist military, and that consolidated its hold on the state in the elec-
tions of 1952, defeating the Partido de la Unión Republicana Socialista
(PURS) (Party of the Socialist Republican Union), a conservative party that
opposed mass-based populism. During its existence as a party, the MNR
went from being fascist to socialist in its orientation, with the Left ideology
holding sway from the late 1940s until its fall from power at the hands of a
1964 military coup that saw military juntas alternate with civilian govern-
ment until the decisive Bánzer military dictatorship of 1971.
A voice that emerged from within the context of the Bolívar Society was
that of author Lucío Diez de Medina, who took the reflection on Bolívar in
a new direction, turning him into a symbol of direct action for the social
good, one that the new political elite and old military in Bolivia could call
upon as they positioned themselves at home, in Latin America, as well as in
the Pan American world of the United States. He produced two tomes, the
first in 1943, entitled La vida heroica del libertador (The Heroic Live of the
Liberator). As if he were introducing an unknown figure to the public, in
this work he starts off by demonstrating Bolívar’s credentials as a usable
symbol for the present, his figure being one that has long been celebrated
internationally, beloved in Europe and the Soviet Union. He goes on to
speak of Pedro Domingo Murillo, the leader of Alto Peru who in 1809
declared independence from Spain and who soon after was apprehended
and executed by the Spanish. Murillo is a martyr, we are told, but he is also
410  R. T. CONN

a precursor of Bolívar. For the chapters of the biography itself, Diez de

Medina draws on the Venezuelan tradition, meaning its debates and ­critical
postures. In one example of this, assuming the rhetorical position of defender
of Bolívar against his calumniators—a vision of Bolívar newly articulated by
Vicente Lecuna in the late 1930s—he explains to the reader why Bolívar had
no choice but to declare his War to the Death, even censuring the Venezuelan
historian Carlos A. Villanueva just as Vallenilla Lanz had.34 Protecting the
reputation of Bolívar, calling into question those who criticized him, identi-
fying the countries of the world where he was idolized: here was the task he
assigned himself.
The year 1952 was a turning point. After defeating the Bolivian armed
forces, the MNR, which had shed its fascist elements, quickly moved to
redistribute lands to thousands of Indians, nationalize the tin industry,
reduce the size of the old military, limit the role of the military to that of
agent of infrastructure development, and deliver the vote to all Bolivians.
The outlines of the new state constituted by the MNR, with its middle-­
class elite, could be seen, interestingly enough, in a 1954 edition of
Bolívar’s life, authored again by Lucío Diez de Medina, and brought out
by the Bolivarian Society with the sponsorship of the Defense Ministry
and the Naval Forces.35
In the prologue, written by the society’s president, Bolívar is celebrated
as the founder of Bolivia, the figure who masterfully saw to it that the ter-
ritory that took his name became an independent nation when two former
viceroyalties could have claimed it as their own.
In this new context, Diez de Medina approaches Bolívar’s life differ-
ently. Instead of beginning with Murillo, he now organizes his narrative
around the cities and regions visited by Bolívar, responding to those who
would challenge Bolívar’s significance for Bolivia by showing that during
his brief five months in the territory he was everywhere, from La Paz to
Oruro to Potosí. More significantly, though, is what Diez de Medina says
in particular about Bolívar’s acts in the territory, acts aligned with the
programs of the MNR. He tells his readers of Bolívar’s progressive legisla-
tion granting the indigenous rights to land, distributing lands to victims of
the Spanish counter-revolution of 1814, and more generally instituting
the concept of equality and representation to end the cacique system. It
was a radical vision that had been set aside by creole elites, who built in the
nineteenth century a hacienda (landed estate) and obraje (textile work-
shop) system that exploited Indians more fiercely than in Spanish colonial
times. Bolívar’s agenda needed to be resurrected.
 15  BOLÍVAR IN BOLIVIA: ON FATHERS AND CREATORS  411

The MNR with its early fascist leanings had been of concern to the
United States in the 1940s, but now the party had moved sufficiently to
the center to appeal to a United States in search of proxies to defeat com-
munism and socialism in the Cold War period. As Frederick Pike and
Kenneth D.  Lehman have shown, the United States during the 1950s
pumped money into Bolivia with the hopes of helping the MNR and even-
tually the new military, reconstituted at the insistence of the United States
in the 1960s, not only to resolve matters of social inequality, but also to
do so effectively enough to permit the new Bolivia imagined by the United
States to be showcased to the world, a country with an economic model
superior to that of communism or socialism.36
At this time, there was a resurgence of interest in Sucre. Scholars and
writers now hearkened back to the 1920s, desirous of recuperating a leg-
islative tradition identified with Sucre and presenting Bolivian indepen-
dence as an autonomous process, the result of heroic actions of the likes of
Murillo and replete with the examples of virtue on which a nation could
establish a foundation. Among them was an older Marcos Beltrán Ávila
who threw himself back into the public sphere, and recent US American
PhD in History, William Lee Lofstrom.
Beltrán Ávila, in El tabú bolivarista (The Bolivarist Taboo), published in
1960, argues that Bolivia did not need its “namesake,” for in fact it had
already liberated itself before the arrival of the Colombian army in 1825,
a stance he had sketched out in the 1920s; but Bolivia did need Sucre,
whom Beltrán Ávila portrays now heroically resisting the dictator Bolívar
by being true to his Bolivian constituencies, his view of Bolívar now more
radicalized in its critique. Beltrán Ávila has obviously changed his mode of
engagement with regard to his work of earlier decades. Eschewing the
objectivity he presumed to possess in building a Bolivian historical tradi-
tion, he now sought to drive his sword into the MNR, which had been
using the military to keep social order and repress protest in mining dis-
tricts and which, in addition, had renewed its pact with the United States
and the CIA to keep itself free of international communism. Bolívar does
not stand for sensible military leadership or for legal process. On the con-
trary, Bolívar repressed the Bolivian nation in the moment it was being
born, his desire to build a large confederation making him insensible to
Bolivian interests.37
Lofstrom, similarly lining up behind Sucre, in his El mariscal Sucre en
Bolivia (The Marshall Sucre in Bolivia), for which he did research in 1968
412  R. T. CONN

and 1969 in connection to his 1972 dissertation at Cornell University but

did not publish until 1983, in Spanish translation under the title given,
credits the leader with seeking to institute a liberal program during his
three-year term as president, including the creation of the port city of
Cobija, which, Lofstrom argues, was resisted by entrenched elites who,
spread out over several cities, had no motivation to change the economic
and social order.38 For the US American scholar, the model of liberal lead-
ership offered by Sucre represents a legitimate alternative to the MNR,
which though defeated was still the party that had the most legitimacy.
Here was a progressive who, though erring in his enthusiastic plans for
Cobija, is able to take on capital from within the context of democratic
republican government, an understanding of Sucre that would have
appealed to progressive liberal nationalists, but also to a United States
once determined to recreate Bolivia in its image.
The relatively open political climate that allowed intellectuals opposed
to the government to go to Sucre did not last for long, as sectors of the
mining districts controlled by the MNR struck against the government,
with many members being jailed and killed, and with the military coup of
1964 that brought into power René Barrientos Ortuño and the period of
the MNR to an end. There were other events. In 1966, convinced that
Bolivia, with its history of Leftist mobilization, was ripe for international
revolution now that the MNR was out, Che Guevara entered the country,
establishing an insurgency in the south that would not receive the popular
support he had anticipated and that would be quickly crushed, himself
captured and executed by the Bolivian military with the assistance of the
CIA. Just after Che’s death, Barrientos ordered the massacre of striking
Bolivian miners, accompanied by members of their families, an event
known as the San Juan Massacre.
Writer Óscar Soria reconstructs the terror in the 1971 film Coraje del
pueblo, The Courage of the People (dir. Jorge Sanjinés), made during the
Left-leaning dictatorship of Juan José Torres (1970–1971) and narrated
by a Bolivian activist in her testimonio.39 Out of the confrontation of the
1960s, new leaders had emerged, with miners acting on their grievances,
including the activist we have just referred to, Domitila Barrios de
Chúngura, the wife of a jailed miner who witnessed the massacre of 1967
and who rose to be the leader of the Miners’ Housewives’ Committee.
Barrios de Chúngura’s life story was published in 1977 by Mexican
writer Moema Viezzer, who in 1975 had met her at the UN-sponsored
International Year of the Woman conference, celebrated in Guadalajara,
Mexico. At the conference Barrios de Chúngura spoke out on the
 15  BOLÍVAR IN BOLIVIA: ON FATHERS AND CREATORS  413

importance of considering social class in addition to gender; not all women

were the same.40 Becoming world famous through her testimonial narra-
tive, Barrios de Chúngura used her fame in late 1977 to stand up to the
US-backed government of Hugo Bánzer. She participated in a hunger
strike against the military leader, one of such power that it resulted in his
resignation and ushered in, after a series of brief Leftist dictatorships, a
new period of democratically elected governments.
President Hugo Bánzer (1971–1978), after defeating the Leftist mili-
tary leader Juan José Torres in a violent struggle, shut down political par-
ties, closed universities, and exiled and killed political rivals, signing off on
Argentine General Jorge Rafael Videla’s decision to assassinate Torres via
Operación Cóndor in Buenos Aires in 1976. He had his supporters.
Roberto Prudencio R., an important Bolivian humanist who directed a
major journal for several decades, stopping publication in 1953 when
going into exile after being removed from his university position by the
MNR and resuming it in 1970, penned in the 1970s Bolívar y la fun-
dación de Bolivia (Bolívar and the Founding of Bolivia).41
In this work, which appeared posthumously in 1977 and which drew on
the knowledge Prudencio R. had cultivated through his previous writings,
he constructs an internationally minded, humanistic figure knowledgeable
of the different Latin American nations, a person who was empathetic and
moral and who also was the prototype of the democrat, a figure quite dif-
ferent from the one who imagined a large Latin American state and whom
leaders on the Left in Latin America held up for this reason as a model.
Prudencio R. would use his brief narrative about Bolívar as an occasion to
retell the history of the Bolivian nation to the international OEA (OAS)-
oriented audience that Bánzer cultivated.42
The whitewashed story he presents about Bolivia’s origins, one that
allows him to avoid having to speak of the political violence and repression
that characterized recent Bolivian history or, conversely, of the Bánzer
government’s economic success, made possible by access to credit with
the support of the Nixon administration, is three-pronged. It is an eco-
nomic one, starting with a celebration of Potosí in the world system, the
wealth produced by the Potosí Cerro Rico (bountiful hill) allowing Spain
to expand its imperial power and serving as a basis for the Renaissance but
neatly avoiding the history in the twentieth century of the tin monopoly
of Simón Patiño, and of his son Antenor, the nationalization of the mining
sector in 1952, or worker struggles.43 It is a political one, focusing on the
suffering, indeed the martyrdom, of Pedro Domingo Murillo and some in
1810 but leaving out the martyrdom of others, particularly of those in the
414  R. T. CONN

mining sector, with no mention of any of the massacres that occurred over
the decades. Finally, it is a legal one. At the beginning of the essay,
Prudencio R. celebrates Bolívar’s position on the matter of his hesitancy
with regard to the formation of the Bolivian legislature as a sign of his
commitment to the law, and details the geographical boundaries that are
Bolivia’s, doing the latter to perform the country’s territorial sovereignty.
He also speaks of the prestigious University of Charcas in Sucre that was
founded in 1625, now the Chuquisaca Royal and Pontifical University of
St Francis, or USFX.
Attended by elites from across South America, the university was a cen-
ter for the study of law and theology. Among its graduates, Prudencio R.
tells us, is an indigenous man named Don Domingo Choquehuanca, who
receives Bolívar with a short encomium he has written in Aymara. So that
Bolívar can understand it, he has translated it into Spanish, just after the
leader, passing around the sacred Lake Titicaca, has crossed the border
separating Bajo Peru (Lower Peru) from Alto Peru (Upper Peru). What is
important is not only the fact of Don Domingo Choquehuanca’s degree,
but also, we are told, that he is 100% indigenous. Having in this way estab-
lished his credentials as a voice of the pre-Hispanic past and of the colonial
period, Prudencio R. transcribes the encomium. It relates that God first
created Manco Kapac, legendary founder of the Incan capital, then, after
300 years, taking pity on America, which has needed that length of time
to atone for the murder of the conqueror Francisco Pizarro, created
Bolívar.44 Prudencio R. is continuing in this way to construct the legal
foundation he desires for his country against the backdrop of military
coups and dictatorship, only now he is doing so through the figure of an
indigenous man of law who deifies Bolívar as part of a legal theology
rooted in the Incan world and in the conquest, which saw Pizarro killed
by another conqueror. In the final pages of his essay in what is a culminat-
ing instance of the narrative of legality he is producing, he focuses on what
is, perhaps, most crucial for his aims, Bolívar’s Bolivian Constitution.
Minimizing the importance of its lifetime president, Prudencio R.
presents the constitution in such a way as to define it by the legal vision
of Montesquieu, checks and balances and all.45 What is the result of all
this? Prudencio R. has made Bolivia redescend from Bolívar, the coun-
try’s name and Bolívar’s constitution defended, with Bolívar’s project for
an Andean Federation neatly sidelined. There is nothing illegal about
Bolívar’s figure in Bolivia, with constitutionalism now meaning Bolívar,
not Sucre. Bolivia is newly recognizable in an OAS-sanctioned world that
knows Bolívar.
 15  BOLÍVAR IN BOLIVIA: ON FATHERS AND CREATORS  415

The period ushered in by the social mobilization of figures like Domitila

Barrios de Chúngura, the so-called return to democracy in the 1980s, fol-
lowed by neoliberalism in the 1990s, also saw new publications on Bolívar.
In 1981, José Roberto Arze brought out Páginas sobre Bolívar (Pages
About Bolívar), a collection of his journalistic pieces of previous years,
some engaging with Soviet writings on Bolívar and one arguing that Latin
America needed to separate from the OAS and establish subregional orga-
nizations.46 In 1984 Roberto Jordán Pando published De Bolívar a la
revolución boliviana (From Bolívar to the Bolivian Revolution).47
Here Jordán Pando uses Bolívar to narrate the history of political move-
ments in Bolivia from the 1930s forward, a history in which he himself
figures—as grassroots organizer, university dean (rector), and at the time
of the writing ambassador to the United Nations. Jordán Pando presents
Bolívar as a pragmatic thinker without a preconceived set of ideas, without
an ideology, if you like, who cared deeply about the popular classes, the
indigenous, and those enslaved. The figure of whom he speaks is an inter-
nationalist who imagined and convened the diplomatic body that was the
Panama Congress, representing the first instance of a vanguard continen-
tal in scope that seeks to overcome the entrenched interests of local
national elites. In the twentieth century he imagines that vanguard as con-
sisting of the likes of Sandino, Neruda, and Allende, the Bolívars, as he
puts it, of their time, and in Bolivia of the MNR. The epigraph that intro-
duces his history of the MNR, borrowed from the last stanza of Neruda’s
1941 “Un canto para Bolívar,” of which we spoke in Chap. 1, in a sense
says it all.48
Jordán Pando equates the MNR with Neruda’s Bolívar who awakens
every hundred years to fight for the downtrodden, using Neruda in this way
to reposition Bolivia in the mainstream Latin American Left tradition of the
twentieth century. How Jordán Pando imagines the MNR in the light of the
“Bolivarian epic” is of great interest, for ultimately his argument is that there
is no state model in the Bolivarian legacy that is usable. Still, even after say-
ing this, he takes pains to distance himself from Bolívar’s mega state, oppos-
ing the Liberator’s pan-regional vision of a Bolivia integrated, which was
never a viable possibility, to the model adopted by the leadership of the
MNR, that of Mexico’s Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI).49 The
PRI is the only model for Bolivia, Jordán Pando argues, first, because in the
eyes of Bolivians Bolivia has a history similar to that of Mexico, and second,
because the PRI has found a way to negotiate a Left position for itself in an
intermediate space between the Soviet Union and the United States.
Regarding the MNR’s descent, Jordán Pando states that the MNR would
416  R. T. CONN

have survived, returning to its democratic roots, had it adopted the presi-
dential no re-election principle of the PRI.50 He makes no reference,
though, to the PRI’s own legacy of repression, specifically that regarding
the violence it unleashed against student and worker protesters along with
Mexicans at large on October 2, 1968 to clear the streets for the Olympics
(October 12–October 27), a moment that politicized the Mexican intelli-
gentsia and public in new ways, with 1968 standing as a watershed year, and
with the 1968 of the United States making itself heard two weeks later when
US American Olympic Gold and Bronze winners, Tommie Smith and John
Carlos, raised their black gloved fists from the podium saluting Black Power.
If history made Jordán Pando’s argument obsolete as a result of the
end of the Cold War, at least for the moment, the conclusion of that
decades-long global ideological battle also opened up new sites for
Bolivarian cultural warfare. In 1990, Donato Urria Torres published a
paperback schoolbook edition for adolescents in which he presents Bolívar
as a foundational myth for a purportedly meritocratic Bolivia free of racial
or ethnic division, the poster boy for white elites of Bolivia’s cities, desir-
ous of celebrating individual initiative in the neoliberal order. “Bolivia is
a country in which we all have the opportunity to ascend to the highest
positions. But that equality of opportunity is the foundation of our
democracy; alone it allows us to move up,” he explains.51 In the body of
the text, Urria Torres provides stories of an exemplary figure who from
the time he is a young boy does not shy away from challenges; supplies
reproductions of portraits showing a “white” Libertador with language in
the caption of one stating that the portrait is that of J. Gil and that Bolívar
approved it;52 includes a chronology of his life with a list of his important
battles and major writings; and adds in the last pages of the book a slew
of questions to be answered using the information provided.
But the battle over Bolívar and Sucre in Bolivia has gone on. In 2006
Ramón Rocha Monroy brought out his magical realist-inspired ¡Qué solos
se quedan los muertos! Vida (más allá de la vida) de Antonio José de Sucre
(How Lonely are the Dead! The Life (Beyond This Life) of Antonio José de
Sucre),53 an ambitious work in which a Sucre betrayed by history speaks
from the grave, much like the well-known characters, Juan Preciado,
Dorotea, and Susana, in the Mexican Juan Rulfo’s much-­celebrated and
much-read 1955 novel Pedro Páramo do.54
Then there is Evo Morales, Bolivia’s first indigenous president and for-
mer cocalero union leader, who was elected in 2005 and forced from the
presidency on November 10, 2019 by the military, with the support of the
OAS and the United States. Morales selects as the figure to rally around,
 15  BOLÍVAR IN BOLIVIA: ON FATHERS AND CREATORS  417

not Sucre, but Bolívar. The selection is significant, and perhaps obvious.
Bolívar and Sucre have both been squarely in the hands of the country’s
white elites. But Bolívar’s hemispheric/international reach and fungibility
far surpass Sucre’s. Morales goes to Bolívar for this reason, re-deploying the
leaders’ cultural and political capital to have Bolívar stand for the beginning
of a new narrative with new content. Never mind Bolívar’s plans to bring
Bolivia into the larger union of which he dreamed, Morales asserts that he
is the creator of the state and that he stands against imperialism. At the same
time, Morales could not be further from the monumental Eurocentric story
Prudencio R. tells in the times of Bánzer, that is, of clean and violence-­less
capitalist development made possible in its origins by the Cerro Rico of
Potosí. His new story is about the struggle of the Bolivian indigenous to
have dignity and voice. Morales, in his project to accord full and real citi-
zenship to Bolivia’s majority indigenous population, moves the category of
race and institutionalized racism into the forefront, reversing the terms in
which race had always been seen from the perspective of state leadership
and the society at large. Bolívar could now be called upon by Bolivia’s
indigenous. They were the successors.55
In the sphere of culture, new works emerged in support of the Bolivia
Morales was seeking to reform and reconstruct through inclusion. In his
2009 film Southern Zone, director Juan Carlos Valdivia portrays whites in
the new Bolivia as effete and increasingly irrelevant, immobile in a world
of changing social relations propelled by the expanding cultural and eco-
nomic power of the urban indigenous. The film was perhaps a homage of
sorts to Tamayo’s 1910 attack on Bolivian white elites and his proposal to
replace them with European ones. It was a wake-up call, a film pointing to
an historic decadence that whites needed to respond to. They were again
Tamayo’s decadent Grecians who do not produce.
Morales’s enemies did not miss a beat. Going back to what had con-
gealed in the Bolivian tradition as a way to disqualify leaders and seeking to
dismiss Morales as a lackey of Hugo Chávez, they evoked Tamayo rival
Alcides Arguedas’s positivist formulation of the 1920s, conceived to dis-
qualify Sabino Pinilla’s La creación de Bolivia. In that formulation, Arguedas
characterizes Sucre as an ineffective constitutional surrogate for the real
power that is the caudillo Bolívar, Sucre’s three-year presidency, 1826–1828,
nothing but a spectacle of republicanism. With Chávez now representing
Bolívar, a figure he sought to embody during his tenure as president
(1999–2013), they presented Morales as bearing the same relationship to
Chávez that Sucre did to Bolívar. Morales is nothing but a stand-in for
someone else’s Bolivarian Revolution, a figure who is illegitimate.
418  R. T. CONN

Notes
1. See Galería de hombres célebres de Bolivia. Ed. José Domingo Cortés
(Santiago: Impr. de la República, 1869).
2. Marcos Beltrán Ávila, Ensayos de crítica histórica al margen de algunos
libros bolivianos (Oruro: Imprenta “La Favorita,” 1924).
3. Ibid., 17–18.
4. Carlos Blanco Galindo, Ed., Cartas del General Antonio José de Sucre:
Gran Mariscal de Ayacucho (La Paz: Litografía e Imprenta “Moderna,”
1918), iii. In the prologue Blanco Galindo writes: “Sucre, por toda su
labor administrativa es más nuestro que venezolano. Es para nosotros el
primer ciudadano boliviano, el hombre puro por excelencia, aquel en cuya
vida debemos reconcentrar nuestras más íntimos pensamientos y buscar el
modelo diario de imitación aunque difícil de imitar.” “Sucre, because of all
his administrative labor, belongs more to Bolivia than to Venezuela. He is
for us the first Bolivian citizen, the pure man par excellence, the one in
whose life we should focus our most intimate thoughts and find the model
to imitate daily no matter how difficult that may be.”
5. Sabino Pinilla, La creación de Bolivia, Prologue/Notes Alcides Arguedas
(Madrid: Editorial America, 1917).
6. Sabino Pinilla, Prologue, Casto Rojas, Notes, Carlos Blanco Galindo,
Crónica del año 1828 (Continuación de “La creación de Bolivia”)
(Cochabamba: Editorial López, 1928), 47. “Creían que esta intervención
era natural porque cien veces había tenido lugar en la época del
colonialiaje.”
7. Ibid., 48. “el gobierno se dio rodeado por todos los bolivianos quienes
juraron morir antes que transigir con la invasión”.
8. Alcides Arguedas, El pueblo enfermo: contribución a la psicoolgía de los pueb-
los hispano-americanos (Barcelona: Viuda de Louis Tasso, 1909).
9. See Franz Tamayo, Obra escogida. Ed. Mariano Baptista Gumucio (Caracas:
Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1979), 59–60. English Translation is mine. “Porque
el indio no es ni ha sido probablmente jamás, lo que en ridículo estilo se
llama un intelectual, y que constituye hoy digamos de paso, la forma más
repugnante de la pereza sudamericana. Siempre dentro de las probabili-
dades inductivas, buscad entre los Indios cualquier cosa, pero nunca hom-
bres de letras a la moderna, poetas de oficio (qué antifrase), pensadores a
sueldo, filosofos asalariados y toda esa flora morbosa del intelectualismo
que hoy es el signo más irrecusable de la degeneración europea. Lo que se
podrá encontrar en el indio, restrospectivamente, son tal vez estrategos,
legisladores, ingenieros (las grandes entradas incásicas sólo comparables
hoy con los grandes trabajos de Suez, del Simplón o del Nilo, y que super-
arán a los similares romanos), profetas tal vez, edificadores de imperios,
rectores de razas, y nada más, o poco más. Buscad en el alma primitiva del
 15  BOLÍVAR IN BOLIVIA: ON FATHERS AND CREATORS  419

indio algo de la simplicidad y grandeza romanas, algo del espíritu ses-

óstrico; pero nunca el histrionismo del gréculo decadente o el hedonismo
del muelle bizantino. Eso no existe en el indio de hoy ni en el de ayer, y es
en esto justamente que se diferencia su humanidad de la histórica civili-
zación desarrollada en la taza del Mediterráneo.”
10. Alcides Arguedas, Raza de bronce (La Paz: González y Medina, 1919).
11. Alcides Arguedas, La fundacion de la República (Madrid: Editorial-­
America, 1920).
12. Alcides Arguedas, Historia general de Bolivia (el proceso de la nacionalidad)
1809–1821 (La Paz: Arno hermanos, 1922).
13. Alcides Arguedas, Historia de Bolivia: Los caudillos letrados, la confeder-
ación Peru-Boliviana, Ingavi; o la consolidación de la nacionalidad, 1828–
1848 (Barcelona: Sobs de López Robert, 1923).
14. Alcides Arguedas, Historia de Bolivia: la plebe en acción (Barcelona: Sobs
de López Robert, 1924).
15. Alcides Arguedas, La dictadura y la anarquía: 1857–1864 (Barcelona:
Sobs de López Robert, 1926).
16. Alcides Arguedas, Los caudillos bárbaros, historia—resurrección.—La trage-
dia de un pueblo (Melgarejo—Morales) 1864–1872 (Barcelona: Viuda de
L. Tasso, 1929).
17. Edmundo Paz-Soldán writes that the principal objective of Pueblo enfermo
is to attack and delegitimize not the indigenous but mestizos or cholos.
“Nación (enferma) y narración: El discurso de la degeneración en Pueblo
enfermo de Alcides Arguedas,” Revista Hispánica Moderna, Vol. 52, No. 1
Jun., 1999: 60–76.
18. Alcides Arguedas, La fundacion de la República (La Paz, Bolivia: Librería
Editorial “Juventud,” 1981), 212–214.
19. Ibid., 213, Trans. mine: “…el apocamiento indígena y la veleidad
íbera,” 213.
20. Sabino Pinilla, La creación de Bolivia, Prologue/Notes Alcides Arguedas
(Madrid: Editorial America, 1917), 189. “como dos hermanas que dejan
la casa común por cuidar mejor de su familia respectiva, protestándose para
siempre una sincera amistad y el deseo de su mutua felicidad.”
21. Ibid., 15: “Y concluye asegurando, como René-Moreno, de manera deci-
siva y categórica, que ‘el verdadero creador de BoliviaBolivia fué el gran
mariscal de Ayacucho.”
22. Ibid., 56–60.
23. Sabino Pinilla, Prologue Casto Rojas, Notes Carlos Blanco Galindo,
Crónica del año 1828 (Continuación de “La creación de Bolivia”)
(Cochabamba: Editorial López, 1928), 123.
…victima de esas tendencias, estalladas en un cuartel, después de haber
cimentado la institucionalidad y el progreo efectivo de su patria
adoptiva.
420  R. T. CONN

24. Idem, 36. “…pero es igualmente verdadero que la opinion general del
pueblo sostenía los principios democráticos…” “But it is equally true that
the general opinion of the people supported democratic principles…”
25. Sabino Pinilla, Crónica del año 1828 (Continuación de “La creación de
Bolivia”), i–ii.
26. José A. Deheza, La grandeza espiritual del Libertador Bolívar: En home-
naje al Centenario de su muerte y en honor al ejército de Bolivia (Sucre: Imp.
“Bolívar,” 1930), V–VI.
27. Ibid., 27–40.
28. Ibid., 52–54.
29. Ibid., 41–42.
30. José Ingenieros, El hombre mediocre; ensayo de psicología y moral (Madrid:
“Renacimiento.” 1913).
31. José A. Deheza, 80.
32. Ibid., 81. “Ved ahí como el estudio psicológico de Ingenieros sobre la
contextura del hombre mediocre, nos sirve en esta oportunidad para decir
a los impugnadoes de la gloria de Bolívar; que la obra libertadora de este
hombre extraordinario, ha consistido precisamente en la dignificacion de
los pueblos, en conquistar la perfectibildad del linaje humano, mediante la
pureza de las democracias, mediante la aplicacion honesta de la ciencia
práctica del gobierno, mediante la unidad ética de la raza para alcanzar la
cumbre de la grandeza moral y de su glora.”
33. Politician and writer Roberto Jordan Pando explains the process whereby
the traditional parties lose legitimacy as a result of the war. De Bolívar a la
revolución boliviana (Buenos Aires: Editorial Legasa, 1984), 34.
34. Lucío Díez de Medina, La vida heroica del libertador (La Paz: Escuela
Tipográfica Salesiana, 1943), 42.
35. Lucío Diez de Medina, El libertador en Bolivia (La Paz: Editorial Militar,
1954).
36. See in Frederick Pike, The United States and the Andean Republics: Peru,
Bolivia, and Ecuador (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), 292–
294; and in Kenneth D. Lehman, Bolivia and the United States: A Limited
Partnership (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1999), 136–137.
37. Marcos Beltrán-Ávila, Tabú bolivarista, 1825–1828; comentario al margen
de los documentos que tratan de la fundación de Bolivia (Oruro: Universidad
Técnica de Oruro, Departamento de Extensión Cultural, Seccion
Publicaciones), 184–185. “…y Libertad y Soberanía fueron destruidas por
el antidemocrattico proceder del Dictator.”
38. William Lee Lofstrom, El mariscal Sucre en Bolivia (La Paz: Bolivia:
Editorial e Imprenta Alenkar Ltd, 1983).
39. El coraje del pueblo (Dirección: Jorge Sanjinés. Guión: Oscar Soria y Jorge
Sanjinés, 1971).
 15  BOLÍVAR IN BOLIVIA: ON FATHERS AND CREATORS  421

40. Domitila Barrios de Chungara and Moema Viezzer, ‘Si me permiten

hablar’: Testimonio de Domitila, una mujer de las minas de Bolivia (México,
Argentina: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1978).
41. Roberto Prudencio R., Bolívar y la fundación de Bolivia (La Paz: Editorial
Casa Municipal de la Cultura Franz Tamayo, 1977). Cited from Prudencio
R., Bolívar y la fundación de Bolivia (La Paz: Rolando Diez de Medina,
2005).
42. Ibid., 16.
43. Ibid., 5.
44. Ibid., 17.
45. Ibid., 21.
46. Roberto Arze, Papeles sobre Bolívar (La Paz: Ediciones Roalva, 1981),
99–100.
47. Jordán Pando, De Bolívar a la revolución Boliviana (Buenos Aires: Editorial
Legasa, 1984).
48. Ibid., 29.
49. Ibid., 33–34.
50. Ibid., 107.
51. Donato Uria Torres, Biografía del Libertador Simón Bolívar (La Paz,
Bolivia: Librería Editorial “Juventud,” 1990), 8. Trans. mine. “Bolivia es
un país en que todos tenemos la oportunidad de escalar las más altas posi-
ciones. Pero esa igualdad de oportunidades es la base de la democracia,
solo nos permite ascender.”
52. Ibid., 27.
53. Ramón Rocha Monroy, ¡Qué solos se quedan los muertos! Vida (más allá de
la vida) de Antonio José de Sucre (Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia: Editorial
El País, 2006).
54. Juan Rulfo, Pedro Páramo (New York: Grove Press, 1994, first published
1955).
55. Evo Morales, presidential speech at Potosí on August 5, 2015, Palabras
del Presidente del Estado Plurinacional de Bolivia, Evo Morales, en la
proclama del Libertador Simón Bolívar conmemorando los 188 aniversario
de la fundación de la patria y las FFAA (Words of the president of the pluri-
national state of Bolivia Evo Morales, in his Liberator Simone Bolívar proc-
lamation commemorating the 188 anniversary of the founding of the
nation and of the armed forces). (La Paz: Ministerio de la communicacion,
Estado Plurinacional de Bolivia, 2015). https://www.comunicación.gob.
 CHAPTER 16

Institution Building in Peru: Ricardo

Palma and Víctor Andrés Belaúnde

Seeking to steer the talented of war-torn Europe to Peru, the jurist, essay-
ist, and statesmen Víctor Andrés Belaúnde, of whom we spoke in Chap. 10,
writes in 1945 that, as exemplified by San Martín’s and Bolívar’s armies
both going to Peru, all roads lead to the Mecca or Rome that is Lima.1
Geo-political rhetoric aside, the conservative internationalist Belaúnde
was not uttering a falsehood with regard to the strategic importance of his
country for the final phase of independence. Honored by the emerging
state in the 1860s with statues in the main plazas of Lima, the two libera-
tors played complementary roles in the liberation of Peru. This chapter
explores Belaúnde’s writings as well as those of the famous nineteenth-
century satirist Ricardo Palma. Both intellectuals used Bolívar to their
advantage as they advanced their projects: Palma’s, which was a literary
and a national one, and Belaúnde’s which was more wide-ranging, con-
cerned with the political definition of Peru and the country’s connection
to the hemisphere and world order. But before we consider the uses to
which the two put Bolívar in the sphere of culture and politics, a summary
of the sequence of events that saw San Martín and then Bolívar enter and
exit Peru must be rendered.
Enter San Martín. After a years-long trek with his forces from Cuyo
across the Andes, through Chile, and on commercial vessels into Peru, San
Martín liberated the city of Lima on July 5, 1821, the result of a three-­
month-­long siege that came to an end subsequent to the defection of a
royalist battalion named Numancia that consisted of soldiers from

© The Author(s) 2020 423

R. T. Conn, Bolívar’s Afterlife in the Americas,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26218-1_16
424  R. T. CONN

Venezuela and New Granada. After entering Lima, San Martín declared a
protectorate, called for national elections to be held to vote members of
the new congress, and founded the Patriotic Society. He also sought,
though unsuccessfully, to create a consensus for the adoption of a national
constitutional monarchy, with some Peruvian historians who have linked
this desire to on-the-ground realities in Peru rather than only his long-­
held views. But within a year, San Martín grew disillusioned with divisions
among the elites, half of them wanting independence, the other half not,
never mind the lack of consensus for a constitutional monarchy, a political
system of whose merit for Latin America of which he was so convinced
that he sent an emissary to Europe to find a suitable prince. On September
16, 1822, San Martín resigned before the congress, indicating that he
would retire to private life, having long served the public, and that he
accepted that history would be his judge.
Enter Bolívar. Preceded by his lieutenant, Antonio José de Sucre,
Bolívar arrived in Peru by boat on September 1, 1823, invited by the con-
gress, which promptly named him supreme commander with extra-­
constitutional authority, this on the heels of two major decisions by that
congress: one, to reject San Martín’s proposal for monarchy, and two,
passage of a liberal constitution. With the said authority vested in him,
Bolívar achieved what San Martín could not: the liberation of all of Peru,
the final blow given to the Spanish at the Battle of Ayacucho on December
9, 1824. Subsequent to the battle, Bolívar was once again vested with full
authority by a grateful congress eager to have him shepherd Peru in its
early moments, the region having been particularly divided during the war
years as a result of the many Peruvian loyalists. Making full use of this
authority, Bolívar, who also continued to be president-in-absentia of the
Gran Colombia and had been appointed president of Bolivia by the new
country’s congress before having Sucre take his place, wrote a constitution
for Bolivia at the country’s request and saw to it that Sucre persuaded the
congress to adopt his constitution and that Peru did as well. He took
advantage of his extra-constitutional authority to issue liberal decrees
granting private lands to Peru’s indigenous people, recognizing them not
as members of communities but as citizens of the state with language not
allowing them to sell those lands for two decades, the reasoning being that
they would be literate by that point and able to defend their property from
creole landowners intent on taking them. He also accepted payment from
Peru for his services but directed the one million pesos to compensate his
officers and soldiers. Later in 1826, he resigned, concerned about his
 16  INSTITUTION BUILDING IN PERU: RICARDO PALMA AND VÍCTOR…  425

a­ bility to prevail upon the congress and uneasy about the political turmoil
in Caracas. When the dust settled, which did not take long, San Martín
would be remembered as protector, the title given to him by the congress,
and Bolívar, as the liberator who was also dictator.
Let us start with Ricardo Palma. No figure in the nineteenth century, it
would not be an exaggeration to say, filtered Bolívar through more layers
of discourse than this much-admired and much-read satirist, who between
1870 and 1918 penned hundreds of anecdotal short narratives inspired by
the Spanish novelist Benito Pérez Caldós’s Episodios nacionales (National
Episodes), and by the French writer Honoré de Balzac’s The Human Comedy.
In these pieces, which Palma called tradiciones and published separately and in
series, Palma produced biographies in miniature of figures both major and
minor from Peru’s centuries-long history, dialoguing in print with works on
these figures by Latin American and Spanish scholars, journalists and writers,
some contemporaries with whom he corresponded. Palma entered the
Bolivarian archive by way of caricature, using for this purpose two topics nor-
mally of interest to the leader’s most ardent critics. They were Bolívar the
“dictator” and Bolívar the “womanizer,” which in Peru take on added signifi-
cance for the reason that dictator was the status conferred upon him by the
congress and that he had several, much talked-about female partners during
his time there. Palma’s views of Bolívar as a military and political leader,
invested by the Peruvian Congress with extra-constitutional powers, and
Palma’s views of Bolívar’s affairs with women are curious. For if Palma focuses
on Bolívar as absolute leader and womanizer, it is not to castigate him as oth-
ers such as Ducoudray Holstein have, Bolívar’s most famous and significant
English-language critic. On the contrary, Palma uses notions of Bolívar to
hold up as a mirror to Peruvian society, particularly as this involves gender
relations, in his vast project to imagine Peru across its different political itera-
tions as a continuum of historical scenes for contemporary readers. Palma’s
tradiciones constitute sketches of history conceived for a reading public that is
both male and female—humorous vignettes in which he simultaneously
accentuates and flattens political, cultural, and gender differences. In the
sequence he builds over the course of his career, going from the period of the
Incas up to his present, each assigned a year or a cluster of years, those dealing
with Bolívar span a four-year period, beginning with his entrance into Peru in
1822 and ending with his departure in 1826.
To comprehend Palma’s literary project, we need to know something
about the conditions under which this author was laboring. Palma wrote the
majority of the tradiciones after the debacle of the War of the Pacific. This
426  R. T. CONN

five-year war (1879–1884) saw the Chileans easily defeat the Peruvians and
Bolivians, who had formed an alliance to hold on to the Atacama Desert,
which both nations had neglected but then considered highly desirable after
the discovery of saltpeter by Chilean industrialists. Palma, who following the
war could have remained in Buenos Aires to write for the newspaper La
Nación (The Nation), returned to accept the position of director of the
National Library with the charge of rebuilding the collection that had been
destroyed by the occupying Chilean army. Palma single-handedly restored
the National Library’s archives, in some cases recovering books from local
merchants, pawned to them by Chilean soldiers in exchange for food, but
generally requesting donations from individuals, libraries, and bookstores
from different parts of Latin America and Europe.2
As some critics have noted, Palma conceived of his literary project in
the same way he did his task as director of the National Library, as one of
collecting.3 But if in his role as director it was books that were his object,
in that of writer it was also oral texts and anecdotes from Peru’s Spanish-­
speaking communities as well as from Spain’s vast literary tradition, in
the case of the latter as transmitted through its secular and religious pop-
ular literary traditions. Palma, who saw himself first and foremost as a
Spanish-­language writer just as others in his generation did, strove to be
viewed as having as much authority over the Spanish language as any
writer from Spain might. He artfully labored to legitimize the words and
expressions that had come into existence in Peru during its long history
as a colony and republic, and by extension at a symbolic level all Spanish-
derived words and expressions in Latin America. “But we, the 18 million
people who populate Spain, do not use those verbs in the Peninsula: we
do not need them,” says a Spanish academic in one of Palma’s vignettes.
Commenting on this, the narrator states: “That is to say … that we, more
than 50  million Americans, have no effect on the weigh scale of lan-
guage. … Languages are not like virgins—pure and pristine—but like
mothers, generative of new beings,” he goes on, in the heavily gendered
language typical of Palma.4 Palma, ultimately, was recognized by Spain’s
Royal Academy.
What is key, then, are the concepts of the local, and the national. Palma
creates from Peru’s history a vision based on popular expressions, refrains,
and turns of phrase, both real and invented, following in this way the
model of Spain’s distinguished writers from the early modern period. But
if Palma collects and invents “texts” within defined territorial limits,
whether written or oral, if in the service of his extraordinary wit that in the
 16  INSTITUTION BUILDING IN PERU: RICARDO PALMA AND VÍCTOR…  427

decades ahead would earn him the admiration of both Peru’s Left and
Right he inquires into language with the critical awareness of a Proust or
a Flaubert, he did so with the explicit aim of constructing a liberal open
society in which social relations could be explored and discussed through
language. To this end, he inscribes his Peruvian characters in a world
exquisitely constructed from words construed and misconstrued, appre-
hended and misapprehended. From misapprehension emerges the truth.
In doing so, he creatively supports the agency of women. The Argentine
Juana Manuela Gorriti was one of his most important literary interlocu-
tors, and women constituted a large segment of his readership.5
Finally, if Palma links the promotion of women with the investigation
of the meaning of words and expressions in one and the same cultural
project, Bolívar’s time in Peru provides Palma with the opportunity to
explore this, and at the same time to address Peruvians’ complex if not
contradictory relationship to independence.
For Palma, language, when interrogated, reveals known and unknown
histories, words and expressions illuminating social realities and covering
them over. The first words of which we will speak are titles are attached to
women. Reverberating throughout our discussion, they come to us fil-
tered through the decades-old Peruvian debate as to who is more impor-
tant for Peru: Bolívar or San Martín. Palma, mocking the debate about the
primacy of the one over the other, in “La Protectora y La Libertadora”
inquires into San Martín’s and Simón Bolívar’s famous mistresses, pairing
them in the same way that the men they are associated with have been.6
Variations on the comparison between the two liberators include Bolívar
as a liberal with strong authoritarian impulses and San Martín as a monar-
chist; Bolívar as a political thinker and writer and San Martín as no more
than a military leader who was a brilliant strategist; and Bolívar as dictato-
rial and San Martín, because he established the Peruvian Congress and
refused the title of dictator in favor of that of protector, as respectful of
constitutional authority. Manuela Sáenz and Rosa Campusano are also
opposites, so the narrative ruse goes. Comparing them, Palma identifies
each in the title by the sobriquets passed on to them by tradition, celebrat-
ing, if you like, their identities as the literal linguistic feminine counter-
parts of San Martín, “El Protector” of Peru, and Bolívar, “El Libertador.”
But if Palma makes a point of underlining the male-centered identities
they have within language, feminized appendages, he quickly reworks
those identities in the body of the short narrative, detaching the two
women from the pairings enforced by their sobriquets and using the space
428  R. T. CONN

opened up by that act to produce a vision in which the two come forward
as independent beings with their own biographies. In the version he pro-
vides, and that, as Pamela Murray has said, raises Campusano and Sáenz
above the status conferred upon them by the Peruvian society as mistresses,
Palma speaks of the two as educated women who possess a particular kind
of intellectual culture, opposite female types who are equally worthy, becom-
ing in their time public figures.7 Manuela Sáenz was a reader of Plutarch and
Tacitus, the former the great Greek biographer, the latter the great Roman
historian. She was also a reader of Spanish history and of Spanish literature,
most importantly Cervantes. Among the contexts in which he presents
them, Palma speaks of the great polemic of the nineteenth century—Cathol-
icism versus liberalism—commenting on the irony that Sáenz, who was edu-
cated in the cloisters, should have become a freethinker (librepensador); and
Campusano, who came of age in the midst of what he refers to as social
excitement, should have ended up a devout Catholic. He also presents them
in the context of Spain’s reconquest of the Americas in 1815, stating that
Rosa Campusano found herself on the lists of the Inquisition for having in
her possession a Spanish translation of the scandalous medieval love story,
Abelardo y Eloísa (Abelard and Heloise) and pornographic texts (meaning
the important French libertine or erotic novels of her time).
In this text in which Palma produces biographies for the two, he also
addresses the question of gender identity, presenting femininity and mas-
culinity not simply as instances of the biological self, but also as embodi-
ments of the cultural, the latter as performed in the public sphere, as
Heather Henness has shown in her work.8 In the case of Sáenz, whose
amorous relationship with Bolívar defined her in the eyes of the contem-
porary public just as Campusano’s relationship with San Martín defined
her, he recalls for the reader her penchant for male attire, her habit of cigar
smoking, and her participation in the Colombian army as a colonel, ele-
ments of her public as opposed to her private persona that had been previ-
ously excluded. But the way in which Palma speaks of the gender identities
of the two, famously stating that Campusano is the mujer-mujer (“woman-
woman”) and Sáenz is the mujer-hombre (“woman-man”), together with
his description of Sáenz in another instance as a woman with the spirit of
a man, has led to debate over his views on women. Is Palma activating for
Peruvian consumption a prejudice relegating female subjectivity that does
not correspond to conventional understandings of what it is to be a woman
to an indeterminate and comic cross between female and male essential-
isms? Is he affirming that Campusano represents a norm, and that Manuela
 16  INSTITUTION BUILDING IN PERU: RICARDO PALMA AND VÍCTOR…  429

Sáenz stands outside that norm as different, perhaps even as freak, as

Pamela Murray has suggested in her authoritative work in which she cites
Palma’s words denoting Sáenz as a mistake of nature?9
Or, is Palma underlining the rights of women to elect the persona they
will adopt in the world, with the first noun in the sequence designating
gender as a function of biology and the second gender as defined by
­performance in the world, as suggested by Henness? Palma does make a
concerted effort to show the communities that Campusano and Sáenz
chose to frequent: Campusano that of the female-centered salon where
she was an important conspirator for the patriot cause—a fact he will treat
in another tradición—and Sáenz that of the world of men and of the mili-
tary campaigns they were conducting, and her role as an unofficial mem-
ber of Bolívar’s inner circle. Palma, attuned to what is consumable and
what is not by his readership, and who sees himself as holding a mirror up
to social relations, uses the binaries that undergird the structure of his fic-
tion to present Sáenz as “male-like” with “male ambitions.” At the end of
the piece, stating that both Campusano and Sáenz were beauties in their
youth, the narrator, the alter ego of Palma, inserts himself in the fiction as
a character, as novelists often do in nineteenth-century narrative, sharing
with his readers that he would have preferred Campusano as a lover.10
Freedom for Palma is about publicly defending individual taste, includ-
ing his own.
Palma’s exploration of female subjectivity in the public sphere in rela-
tionship to the presence of San Martín and Bolívar on Peruvian territory
may be seen in another tradición, this one nothing short of a biography of
Rosa Campusano: “Doña Rosa Campusano (‘La Protectora’)” dated
1821.11 Here Palma similarly explodes her identity as “La Protectora,”
though now he does so by recounting details of Campusano’s literary
salon that played an important role in the patriot cause and for which rea-
son she was recognized by both San Martín and the Peruvian Congress.
He also provides details of her love life from before and after her affair
with San Martín, something that would have been perhaps little known at
the time and that is still of less interest than her affair with this one man.
Among these details is a fictitious story he weaves about how men of the
Numancia Battalion who find their way into her salon become enamored
of her and for this reason change sides. Campusano, whose salon did play
an important role in acquiring information from the royalists, is being
portrayed as responsible for the breaking of the Spanish hold on Lima and
creating the conditions for San Martín to enter the city.
430  R. T. CONN

The tradición, however, does not begin with Rosa Campusano but
with a scene from the narrator’s childhood, which explains the reason for
the production of the biography. As is often his hermeneutic stance with
regard to the relationship between past and present, Palma represents his-
torical memory within his fictions as uncertain, the reasons alleged being
a lack of documentary evidence—attributed now to the burning down of
the Lima library, now to another lost repository—and the radical change
that is the product of new generations coming into being. But in this case
gender bias and social hypocrisy play parts. In the story of the narrator
that Palma creates and that frames the biography, the Palma-like figure
who is already fascinated with words finds himself dumbfounded when his
school friend is called “protector” and reacts to this as if to an insult, and
then punches the offender. As he learns, wanting to know how such a
seemingly innocuous word could provoke such a reaction, the friend who
lives only with his father is the son of Rosa Campusano, who, Palma tells
us, resides in an apartment in the national library with a pension from the
congress. The offender, in using the word “protector,” is linking him to
his mother, seeking to shame his friend by referring to the social stigma
that has come to hover over her—a disreputable woman in the eyes of
society who was with San Martín and many men, and who never married.
He is, also, then, calling him bastard. Remembering this when he is older,
the narrator, interrogating the word “protector,” will perform a kind of
reverse genealogy, restoring a “fallen” or forgotten woman to heroic status.12
In addition to the Bolívar-San Martín debate, which is exploded by
Palma, we also see Palma address, now directly, the discursive space that is
Bolívar the womanizer. He does this in a tradición dated 1824 that nar-
rates Bolívar’s entrance into a small Peruvian town. The piece, called “Las
tres etceteras” (“The Three Etceteras”), is written in two parts, with the
first telling of the women who save Bolívar’s life. Some are real, some ficti-
tious.13 In the second part, which takes up the content of the title, Palma
satirizes the ways in which Bolívar’s reputation as womanizer and seducer
is seized upon by Peruvian men who think nothing of objectifying and
mistreating women if they believe they are being called upon to do so by
Bolívar. The situation is the following:
The mayor of the small town to which Bolívar is soon to arrive has
received a dispatch detailing the preparations he is to make and conclud-
ing with three etceteras. The mayor, however, does not understand the
meaning of the word “etcetera,” so calling on his interpretive faculties—
which Palma reveals to be minimal and run through with gender biases,
 16  INSTITUTION BUILDING IN PERU: RICARDO PALMA AND VÍCTOR…  431

some violent—decides that, because they have a female gender, the three
etceteras must refer to young women, whereupon he detains the three
most beautiful ones in his town, holding them captive until the arrival of
Bolívar. Of course, as we might expect, Palma, never missing an opportu-
nity to exploit the metaphoric value of a word, has Bolívar liberate the
local women upon learning of their false imprisonment. But Palma who is
operating within the standard Peruvian iconography of Bolívar as dicta-
tor—whether this word is understood positively or negatively—cannot
allow the figure who has just been welcomed in the town to stand in the
subject position of Libertador. Editorializing, the narrator tells the reader
to restrain her applause for Bolívar, who could afford to “liberate” these
women, already enjoying female company. These are interesting scenes of
Peruvian men objectifying, and even purveying, women in a context
defined by an ingrained machista tradition and by servility to the foreigner,
scenes that humorously take them to task for their lack of acuity within the
familiar and socially acceptable context of men being men.
If in “The Three Etceteras” we see the received idea of Bolívar the
womanizer become the site for a critical send-up of Peruvian machismo, in
“Justicia de Bolívar,” dated 1824, we encounter another received idea,
that of the Colombian army as liberators and Bolívar as dictator, trans-
formed into the occasion for a reflection on female strength and power,
though not in unadulterated form.14 The piece starts off with young
women of Lima who, to the fury of boyfriends and husbands, lustfully
welcome into their homes, we are told, smartly dressed officials of the
Colombian army. In what is clearly tongue in cheek, the narrator tells us
that these women open their doors to the liberators not because they fancy
them but because otherwise they would be perceived as “unpatriotic” or
“anti-modern,” a satiric reference to political discourse of the 1820s justi-
fying the entrance of Colombian forces into Peruvian territory. Yet if the
tradition begins with a scene of collective female sexuality, aroused by the
presence in the city of males different from the ones they are used to, and
staged to mock Peruvian male authority and nationalist discourse, it
quickly moves to another space of female power, the figure of the mother,
who we see hosting a party for Colombian officers. In this, what could
seem like another episode in Palma’s Peruvian Balzacien comedy of errors,
Palma goes on to speak of the mother from the perspective of the prob-
lematic announced in the title, justice. Interestingly, the mother is hardly
an exemplary figure but rather a person whose judgment in the end is as
compromised as that of Palma’s dictatorial Bolívar. Here’s what happens:
432  R. T. CONN

Just as a Colombian officer is attempting to have a sexual encounter

with one of her daughters, the mother takes justice into her own hands,
removing his saber from his holster and stabbing him to death. A royalist,
as we learn, she, like so many other Peruvians of the upper class, would
seem to be exercising the perceived prerogative of her station. But in what
is also an exploration of generations in conflict, with mothers overreacting
in order to protect desiring daughters, perhaps falsely or hypocritically
imagined as desire-less, or maybe mothers seeking to protect daughters
from marrying down, she now proceeds to demand justice from Bolívar for
the alleged sexual assault for which the would-be aggriever has already paid
with his life. With this demand, the question of judgment will center now
not only on her, but also on Bolívar. For without hesitation, the Liberator,
as impetuous as the mother, complies with her demand, penalizing the
now deceased officer’s battalion for the purported crime. He does this only
to reverse himself days later when he learns that his order has not been
received favorably by his much admired lieutenant, General Sucre, who
along with other officers wonders why an entire battalion should be penal-
ized for one man’s actions. The story concludes with the mother continu-
ing to seek justice from the Liberator, being seduced by his manly charms,
and converting from the cause of the royalists to that of the patriots.
As are many of Palma’s pieces, including “The Three Etceteras,” this
tale is allegorical, standing for a Peru that invites Bolívar to liberate it, only
to see an important sector of its elites reaffirm their royalist leanings and
turn against him. This is a Peru that, in short, like all the objects of Palma’s
satire, is fickle: one minute desiring to be liberated, the next standing reso-
lutely against it. Given both his audience of female readers and his project
to present Peruvian social mores of the nineteenth century from the per-
spective of female agency, it is not surprising that Palma would also use the
figure of the mother as an emblem of the uncertain, and perhaps, hypo-
critical forces of reaction in Peru of which Bolívar himself spoke in his
1815 Jamaica Letter, fictionalizing and re-gendering an historical fact all
too familiar to Peruvian readers of the time—namely of male leaders like
De Serna reversing their allegiances.
Palma’s use of language and the figures associated with Bolívar to delve
into Peruvian social mores may be seen in another tradición. In “The
Letter of the Libertadora” (“La carta de la Libertadora”), Palma tells of
the arbitrary manner in which Peru’s short-lived idolatry of Bolívar
between 1825 and 1826 led to the adoption by a generation of the expres-
sion giving title to the piece.15 “The Letter of the Libertadora” is the letter
 16  INSTITUTION BUILDING IN PERU: RICARDO PALMA AND VÍCTOR…  433

in which Manuela Sáenz tells her English husband she cannot return to
him, having secured the affection and love of the great Bolívar, a text that
can certainly be read as a feminist one. What Palma does with this letter in
his reflection on how Peruvians understand the processes of which they
form part is fascinating. First, Palma tells correctly of how the letter became
the occasion for an oral expression. Second, he presents the expression as
the product of the historical fad that was idolatry of Bolívar. Third, he
reconnects the expression to the letter itself that his narrator has come to
possess, explaining that Peruvians have never actually seen the letter,
knowing it only through their oral tradition. The interesting twist is that
the words as they are used in Peru could, in one sense, not be further in
meaning from the act of female self-affirmation that the letter signifies. For
the usage in question refers to a context involving Peruvian mothers, social
order, and marriage, specifically to the moment when Peruvian mothers,
realizing that the young men living in their homes with their daughters
have no intention of marrying, send them, in what is an equivalent we are
told, to the issuance of an eviction notice, the so-called carta de la liberta-
dora. Freeloading young men, happy to enjoy the benefits of domestic life
with their partners without having to establish their own households, are
the recipients of the “letter,” not established married men like Manuela’s
husband, Dr. Thorne. Sáenz’s letter, which performs the rejection of social
order, ironically becomes the occasion, in its metaphorical use, of the
defense of what is socially desirable. At the same time, mothers evicting
freeloading young men are made to represent female authority and agency.
Palma, in reflecting on the being of language in relationship to genera-
tions, is recovering for his readers not only a popular expression and the
story of the conditions of its use but also the text itself that inspired it. The
account of the recovery of the text that at the same time is a fabrication,
taking from the historical record but changing it, is complex, involving
Venezuela, the politics of gender, and good fortune. In reference to an
actual occurrence, he tells his readers that Venezuelan president General
Guzmán Blanco, orders the state to use its printing press to publish the
Bolívar letters collected by the trusted aide Daniel Florencio O’Leary. But
just when the 27th and final volume containing the famous letter is at the
end of its run, the president, becoming aware of its contents, Palma fic-
tionalizes, issues a new order that the printing cease and that all copies be
burned, in what Palma calls, evoking the Inquisition, an auto-da-fe (the
public spectacle of burning a heretic at the stake). The result is that the
letter itself will become difficult to acquire, as difficult to get a hold of,
434  R. T. CONN

jokes the narrator, as a bank note of the Rothschild family who dominated
French and international banking in the nineteenth century, with the few
copies of the volume that escape destruction falling into the hands of print-
ers who immediately understand their value as a collector’s item and with
no copy arriving in Peru, as he indicates in a fake footnote, until 1916.
Two processes of transmission are thus detailed by Palma: the one in the
sphere of orality, as seen in the arbitrary manner in which an expression
comes to have meaning through the logic of generations; the other in that
of writing, as represented by the Bolívar letters, which the Venezuelan state
has begun to exploit and from which the patriarchal Guzmán Blanco has in
the fiction he constructs sought at the same time to edit, erasing one of the
great examples of female self-affirmation. Palma is furnishing Peruvian
women with the literal carta de la libertadora, which had been the occa-
sion for a metaphor once used.
With these interconnected narratives, Palma makes the act of acquiring
and possessing texts, which occupied him daily as director of the National
Library, a central issue. But what is more to the point, perhaps, is that this
writer used in his fiction the act of reflecting on language, in addition to
the philological act of text production and recovery, as an opportunity to
examine the connections between gender, culture, canon formation, gen-
erational conflict, sexual mores, and politics in the context of Peru’s expe-
rience with Bolívar and other leaders of independence.
Recalling the Peruvian villager Manolita Madroño, of whose 1824 amo-
rous connection to Bolívar and continuing dedication to the Liberator
through the entirety of her life (he knew through hearsay) and who died in
1898, Palma, in “La vieja de Bolívar” (“The Girl of Bolívar”), describes her,
just as elsewhere he does others who purportedly slept with the leaders and
officers in the period of independence, as something other than a victim.16
On the contrary, Palma, playing on the literal and figurative meaning of the
word la vieja, which in the first case means old woman and in the second
case means girl, will show in the life he constructs the pride of a woman who
fully remembers herself not as la vieja de Bolívar, as she has been known in
the town of Huaylas, but as the moza, the word meaning young woman
that she insists upon using to describe herself now that she is in fact old. The
literal meaning of the word vieja at this moment of her life is now applicable
to her age. Palma turns on its head a highly-gendered linguistic phrase,
presenting Madroño as a desiring consensual subject while dialoguing with
and recreating the oral tradition. With this, Palma, in his exploration of the
Spanish language as it is employed in Peru, has as his goal both telling the
 16  INSTITUTION BUILDING IN PERU: RICARDO PALMA AND VÍCTOR…  435

stories of a society as revealed in language—stories that contain a multitude

of biographies in miniature somewhere between history and fiction—and
addressing and recuperating female agency, women the unseen and under-
represented actors in a conservative, machista society.
Whereas liberty in its different valences and in the context of Peruvian
social reality is the main theme for Palma in his reflection on Bolívar and
independence, for Víctor Andrés Belaúnde it is the definition of the state
and the relationship of it to regional and hemispheric economic and political
realities. A key work for understanding his vision of Peru and the contexts in
which he was moving is La realidad nacional (The National Reality), pub-
lished in 1931 in Paris—an important site for Latin American exiles. On the
one hand, Belaúnde speaks autobiographically, telling, for example, of how
in the United States he had been expected to give courses on all of Latin
America and of friends like him who are also in exile from the government
of Augusto Leguía.17 On the other, he engages in rigorous political analysis,
complying with requests from intellectuals in Lima to evaluate the writings
of the Peruvian communist thinker José Carlos Mariátegui, who had just
died at the young age of 35, already a major figure. Belaúnde refutes
Mariátegui almost point by point, from his endorsement of Marx’s historical
materialism, particularly in its application to Peru, to his portrayal of Peru as
essentially indigenous rather than mestizo, to Mariátegui’s Russian-inspired
vision of the indigenous economic unit of the Incan period, the allyu, and at
the same time, he recuperates his own intellectual generation, one that was
liberal and humanistic and whose journal El mercurio (Mercury) published
Mariátegui’s works. But Belaúnde does not only critique Mariátegui, he also
offers his own vision of what Peru could be as a capitalistic country, propos-
ing a new breakdown of Peru’s regions to reflect the country’s actual eco-
nomic centers and industries. To do so, he critiques the process of
centralization brought about by the republic, one that created new prov-
inces beyond the cities, provinces with representation that was equal to the
city centers. This had resulted, he submits, in the political bosses of the
mountain regions dominating the congress not the coastal plutocracy.18 To
make capitalism work, the answer was to create new political regions based
on industry.19 The Spanish Cortes, he states, between 1812 and 1814 estab-
lished town governments, following the regional demarcations of the
Bourbon-conceived economically defined administrative departments called
intendencias.20 But Bolívar, through his vision of the electoral college, which
he took from Napoleon, did away with the historical regional nuclei, giving
to the new small provinces great attributions. Peru became atomized in a
process that served the interests of the new central power that was Lima.
436  R. T. CONN

Belaúnde also tells of his earlier intellectual work in the Peru of the
1910s, in which he sought to build the conditions for the production of a
Peruvian middle class. Education was the path forward but his schools,
unlike those in existence that provided only a path to secondary school
and the university, would teach the technical and manual arts. If in other
parts of the Americas, including the United States, Mexico, and Argentina,
the technical and manual arts were being taught along with a humanist
curriculum, it was time, he argues, for Peru to take a stand against its pur-
portedly one-sided educational system—the result, he tells us, of the
Spanish Colonial era, elitist and aristocratic in its aims—in which ­humanistic
knowledge was the only model and in which the value of that system was
measured by the end product that was the few who went on to do doctoral
work. From the new national educational system he imagined, one based
on quality primary school education of the new kind he called for, would
emerge Peru’s middle class, subjects who promised to bring a more
authentic version of liberalism to Peru, embodying that doctrine by way of
the new economy they themselves would create through their modern
laboring bodies.21
Here was a vision that stood against that of one of Belaúnde’s inter-
locutors, Francisco García Calderón who in exile in France produced in
1912 Les démocraties latins de l’Amérique (The Latin Democracies of
America), championing Bolívar as a foundation for his vision of a Peru
that would one day be transformed by European “whites” migrating from
Latin-descended nations to mix with the indigenous people of Peru,
southern Europeans, he insists, who unlike their northern German neigh-
bors, would, indeed, mix with Peruvian local populations rather than iso-
late themselves in enclaves.22 Out of this union, asserts García Calderón,
would emerge a progeny of liberal and modern mestizo citizens to face off
with the country’s elites. The book was immediately translated into
English as Latin America: its rise and progress, with multiple printings.23
Like so many figures from the nineteenth and early-twentieth century,
Belaúnde also advocates European immigration to Peru, as we saw at the
beginning of the chapter. But he was hardly a race thinker of the kind that
García Calderón was. García Calderón writes of superior and inferior races
in accordance with the late nineteenth-century race theory of the likes of
the Frenchman Gustave Le Bon and the need to fuse those races in order
to build a modern citizenry. He was seeking to overcome the Peruvian
white aristocracy.
 16  INSTITUTION BUILDING IN PERU: RICARDO PALMA AND VÍCTOR…  437

Belaúnde also reflects on the president, Augusto Leguía, telling of an

administration that was not only illegal, as far as he was concerned, but
also one that in its dollar diplomacy deal with the United States had sold
its soul. None of the other Latin American dictatorships of the time had
stooped, as he put it, to cooperate with the United States, though the
economic reality was hardly the same for the heads of state of all Latin
American republics, we can be certain. A leader like Venezuela’s Juan
Vicente Gómez, strongman of an oil-rich country, could set the condi-
tions for diplomacy. On the subject of the vaunted US-financed public
works completed during the Leguía administration, he asserts that much
more could have been accomplished. He also made explicit the conditions
for the loans from US banks, explaining that they were advanced only with
the approval of the US state department, a quid pro quo relationship
explaining Peru’s political actions such as ceding part of its territory in the
Amazon to Colombia.24 Belaúnde criticizes Leguía for artificially propping
up the old money of Peru by encouraging the establishment of foreign
consulships and allowing those diplomatic organizations to rent the estates
of the Peruvian aristocracy.25 The political trade-off whereby Peru acted as
proxy is important, but he is concerned with the direct political role that
the United States was playing. After General John Pershing chaired the
failed Tacna-Arica Plebiscitary Commission, President Calvin Coolidge
helped negotiate the 1929 Treaty of Lima that settled the decades-long
dispute among Chile, Peru, and Bolivia, with Bolivia’s claims on the
coastal territory that it had possessed previous to the War of the Pacific
once again going unrecognized. In his critique of the 1929 treaty that
revised the 1883 Treaty of Ancón, he recalls another diplomatic Peru, one
that had been a stand-up player and partner in the region to which it
belonged and that had been a model power. Moreover, he remembers an
honorable Peru that had gone to war against Chile to meets its treaty obli-
gations with Bolivia in a situation in which Bolivia was in fact the aggres-
sor, having declared war after Chile refused to pay the new tax on saltpeter
excavated on the Bolivian lands leased to it. In addition, in the diplomatic
Peruvian history he constructs to oppose to the Leguía government, with
its tales of honor and dishonor multiplying, he tells of how Peru sup-
ported the Dominican Republic when Spain occupied it in 1867. He also
addresses Peru’s and Latin America’s relationship to the new world orga-
nization that was the League of Nations and the long-standing Pan
­American Union. Belaúnde, ever the pragmatist, lays out a strategy for the
future: membership in both, the one an institution akin to Bolívar’s never
438  R. T. CONN

realized Congreso de Panamá, protecting the political rights of a region;

the latter an arm of the United States in which business could be com-
pleted, as Leguía had shown, but which offered little else. The quid pro
quo of Pan Americanism, economic for political cooperation, would be
solved, with the action of Pershing and Coolidge a phenomenon that in
the future would be obviated through clarity about the purviews of
regional and world organizations.
If in Peru Belaúnde had called on Bolívar at will for the purpose of sup-
porting his vision of an ethical state—Bolívar’s idea of a Latin America
united diplomatically that he uses to support his vision of a strong execu-
tive for Peru with a congress that works in tandem with that executive—
and if we see Belaúnde, in the context of his rebuttal of Mariátegui,
attribute the problem of development in Peru to the adoption of Bolívar’s
electoral college, he puts Bolívar to a new use. Distinguishing as we saw in
Chap. 10 between the earlier and later Bolívar, something he did not do
in Peru, he asserts that Bolívar’s Colombian troops in Peru after the mili-
tary victory in 1825, together with the constitution he wrote for Bolivia
and the Federation of the Andes, and briefly adopted by both Bolivia and
Peru, had deleterious effects, representing a top-down vision. In doing
this, Belaúnde elevates scholars and statesman who embodied the national
projects that Bolívar stood against.
Francisco de Paula Santander was one such figure, his vision of a nation
separate from the Gran Colombia showing, Belaúnde insists, good sense.
Another was the nineteenth-century Colombian historian José Manuel
Restrepo whom Belaúnde cites to characterize Bolívar as having allowed
the idea of a large state to take on too much importance, blinding him to
what was sensible. Furthermore, he speaks of the delegates who stood up
to Bolívar at the 1830 Admirable Congress, voting Joaquín Mosquera
president, and who in this way represent, as he would have it, elements of
a democratic tradition. But if Belaúnde critiques Bolívar in this way, he is
also protective of his status as a figure who belonged to the modern liberal
tradition, stating that he never truly entertained the idea of a British mon-
archy for Latin America though he humored his British interlocutors to
rally their support, a vision not dissimilar to that of Bushnell’s stated
in Chap. 2.
Belaúnde went from Peru to the United States and from the United
States back to Peru, holding different diplomatic posts, later returning in
his role as diplomat when back in the United States to participate as a
signatory to the United Nations charter on June 26, 1945. Anchored by
the new world organization, and after 1948 by the Organization of
 16  INSTITUTION BUILDING IN PERU: RICARDO PALMA AND VÍCTOR…  439

American States, Belaúnde now firmly aligned himself within the anti-­
communist Western order.
In his 1966 memoir, 20 años de Naciones Unidas (20 Years of United
Nations),26 in what was a new vision of the Pan American Union, he
describes Bolívar’s Panama Congress as a precursor to the Pan American
Union while he characterizes Bolívar’s interest in including the United
Kingdom at the Panama Congress as a first step in the creation of an Atlantic
order. Belaúnde, who participated in the final meeting in Bogotá of the
Conference of American States under the auspices of the Pan American
Union just before the creation of the Organization of the American States,
also presents his view on the ­assassination of the Colombian leader Jorge
Eliécer Gaitán on April 9, 1948, nine days after the beginning of that meet-
ing. He attacks Gaitán for his purportedly Marxist-inspired views. But he
also accuses Fidel Castro of being the one behind Gaitán’s assassination.
The theory, which would gained some currency after the Cuban Revolution
of 1959, was that Castro, who in fact was in Bogotá at the time—a student
participating in protest against the meeting—had done the bidding of
international communism, removing from the Latin American political
scene a figure with a lock on the Colombian Left. Belaúnde also tells the
reader of his horror at witnessing the citywide riot set off by the assassina-
tion from the rooftop of the hotel where he was staying, the Continental.27
In his 1938 tome, he celebrates the New Granadans (Colombians),
Santander and Restrepo, in his effort at tearing apart Bolívar’s Gran
Colombia and Federation of the Andes. Now he throws his hat in—as he
himself is recording for posterity—with the new militarized conservative
order in the Colombia of the late 1940s and 1950s, saying nothing about
the more distinct possibility that other actors were behind the Gaitán assas-
sination, whether the CIA or the Colombian state as represented by right
wing interests and the Ospina regime, as Germán Arciniegas points to in his
simultaneous Spanish/English publication of Entre la libertad y el miedo
(1951) and The State of Latin America (1952). In fact, Belaúnde describes
Ospina as the heroic victim who showed great courage before the mob that
threatened his office during the three-day period of social explosion.28
With this, Belaúnde stakes out a position on the opposite end of the
political spectrum from that of the Colombian Germán Arciniegas of the
late 1940s and early 1950s, the Arciniegas who at this moment attacked
the new Colombian regime from the United States. The 1945 edition of
La realidad nacional reflects Belaúnde’s new politics, leaving out his cri-
tique of Leguía, of Latin American dictatorship, and of the United States,
just as would the 1964 edition.
440  R. T. CONN

The fact is that Belaúnde did not want to make available to Peruvians
his biting critique of the 1920s’ hemispheric order, providing as it would
a usable map for political action, but he did want to continue to furnish
the public with his Catholic-inspired critique of Mariátegui that offered a
new vision of capitalist-driven modernization.
Belaúnde never stopped deploying Bolívar or responding to visions of
his figure with which he disagreed. In 1967, as others like the Venezuelan
Lecuna and Colombian Arciniegas had in the 1950s, as we touched upon
in Chaps. 7 and 12, respectively, he took issue with the prolific Spanish
writer and diplomat Salvador de Madariaga’s 1951 biography, Bolívar.
Among Lecuna’s responses to the appearance of the book was one, we
recall, that was directed at a review supporting Madariaga’s claim that the
leaders of independence were mestizos.
Belaúnde reacts not to the matter of race but to Madariaga’s portrayal
of Bolívar as having outsize personal ambitions. Bolívar wanted “to
become the emperor of Spanish America under the title of Liberator,”
Madariaga states, using as evidence a purported exchange with San Martín
in their Guayaquil meeting of 1822.29 As we have seen previously and see
more at length in Chap. 17, there is no documentation of the meeting, or
at least no undisputed documentation, but Madariaga turns the tables on
Bolívar’s defenders, stating that Bolívar’s opposition to San Martín’s well-
known position that a European prince should be brought over to the
Americas to govern had nothing to do with his opposition to monarchy as
a form of government, but only with his concern about the prospect of
having competition from another for power.30
At the same time, Madariaga sweeps aside San Martín and Páez, saying
that they too wanted to possess a kind of absolute power. Madariaga was
determined to denounce any form of personalistic authority in his continu-
ing battle with facism and communism in Europe. He had long been an
exile in Britain—since 1936—and a prominent voice of opposition to
Francisco Franco. But Belaúnde would have none of Madariaga’s view of
Bolívar as dictatorial, late though his reaction was. Responding in 1967, he
contributes a chapter entitled “El genio politico de Bolívar y la deformadora
visión de Madariaga” (“The Political Genius of Bolívar and the Distorting
Vision of Madariaga”) to Estudios sobre el “Bolívar” de Madariaga (Inquiries
into the “Bolívar” of Madariaga) funded by the Bolivarian Society in
Venezuela. Madariaga, seemingly always in the crosshairs of the society, is
the most prestigious figure in its canon of calumniators.31 With all the
changes in hemispheric and world institutions, the Bolivarian Society
remained an important nexus for conservative thought.
 16  INSTITUTION BUILDING IN PERU: RICARDO PALMA AND VÍCTOR…  441

Notes
1. Víctor Andrés Belaúnde, La realidad nacional (Lima: n.p., 1964), xiv. The
reference is from the prologue to the 1945 edition, which is the second
edition.
2. Ricardo Palma: Tradiciones Peruanas completas, Ed. and Prol. Edith Palma
(Madrid: Aguilar, 1957), xxxviii–xl.
3. Idem. See also, Ricardo Palma, “La segunda nquisición,” 1280, where
Palma speaks of his efforts at reconstituting Peru’s collection on the
Inquisition after the burning of the national library.
4. Ricardo Palma, “Neologismos y americanismos” (1895) in Ricardo Palma:
Tradiciones Peruanas completas, Ed. and Prol. Edith Palma (Madrid:
Aguilar, 1957), 1379–1380.
5. For evidence of the intellectual relationship between Palma and Gorriti,
see Juana Manuela Gorriti: cincuenta y tres cartas inéditas a Ricardo
Palma, Ed. Graciela Batticuore, 2004 (Buenos Aires: Universidad de San
Martín de Porres). See also on the subject of Palma’s relationship to
Gorriti, Ricardo Palma, 1320–1321.
6. Ricardo Palma, “‘La Protectora’ y ‘La Libertadora’ (1821–1824),”
962–963.
7. See Pamela Murray’s study of the uses of Manuela Sáenz in the different
Latin American national traditions. “‘Loca’ o ‘Libertadora’: Manuela
Sáenz in the Eyes of History and Historians, 1900–c1990,” Journal of
Latin American Studies, Vol. 33, No. 2, May 2001.
8. See Heather Henness’s doctoral thesis on Manuela Sáenz in which she
argues that Palma presents both Campusano and Sáenz in terms of their
public selves: 2005, “The Spaces of a Free Spirit: Manuela Sáenz in
Literature and Film,” Doctoral Thesis (Florida State University Libraries).
9. Pamela Murray, 296–297.
10. Ricardo Palma, 963. Note that Palma, in certain tradiciones, claims to have
met in real life certain historical figures of whom he speaks including
Manuela Sáenz at the end of her life during her long exile in Paita, Peru.
11. Ibid., 952–954.
12. Ibid., “Doña Rosa Campusano (La Protectora) (1821),” 952–954.
13. Ricardo Palma, “Las tres etcéteras del Libertador (1824),” in Ricardo
Palma: Tradiciones Peruanas completas, Ed. and Prol. Edith Palma, 1957
(Madrid: Aguilar), 1012–1015.
14. Ibid., “Justicia de Bolívar (1824),” 999–1004.
15. Ibid., “La carta de ‘La Libertadora’ (1824).”
16. Ibid., “La vieja de Bolívar (1824),” 1009.
17. Víctor Andrés Belaúde, 1931, La realidad nacional (Paris: Editorial “Le
livre libre”), 9.
18. Ibid., 95–96.
442  R. T. CONN

19. Ibid., 100–101.

20. Ibid., 94–95.
21. Ibid., 49.
22. Francisco García Calderón, Les démocraties latines de l’Amérique (Paris:
E. Flammarion, 1912).
23. Francisco García Calderón, Latin America: its rise and progress (New York:
C. Scribner, 1913).
24. Víctor Andrés Belaúnde, La realidad nacional (Paris: Editorial “Le livre
libre,” 1931), 241.
25. Ibid., 245–246.
26. Víctor Andrés Belaúnde, 20 años de Naciones Unidas (Madrid: Ediciones
Cultura Hispánica, 1966), 73–75.
27. Idem.
28. Ibid., 74.
29. Salvador de Madariaga, Bolívar (Coral Gables, Florida: University of
Miami Press, 1952), 441.
30. Idem.
31. Víctor Andrés Belaúnde, Estudios sobre el “Bolívar” de Madariaga (Caracas:
Impr. Nacional, 1967).
 CHAPTER 17

Bolívar in the Río de la Plata

If Bolívar has been the subject of relatively few books and essays in Argentina
and the greater River Plate area that is also Uruguay, this is hardly indica-
tive of his importance in the region, particularly in Argentina, where in the
long process that has seen the buildup of the figure of San Martín, Bolívar
has always been close at hand, serving as the authorizing “Other” of San
Martín in the same manner that Santander has Bolívar in Venezuela, while,
though less frequently, appearing positively as one who acted in unison
with the Argentine leader to liberate the continent. Our interest in this sub-
ject takes as its point of departure an essay by the historian Tulio Halperín
Donghi, “La imagen argentina de Bolívar, de Funes a Mitre” (“The
Argentine Image of Bolívar, from Funes to Mitre”). Written for the 1983
centenary of Bolívar’s birth in Venezuela, it appears in his 1987 book El
espejo de la historia: problemas argentinos y perspectivas latinoamericanas
(History’s Mirror: Argentine Issues and Latin American Perspectives), a
book that seeks to reconstruct Argentina’s liberal tradition in the wake of
the Dirty War (1976–1983).1 We are concerned with the manner in which
the figure of Bolívar has circulated over time in this region and particularly
in relationship to San Martín. Not only have forces specific to Argentina
and Uruguay been at work, but forces from the United States and Europe,
not to mention other parts of Latin America, have as well.
It is important to begin the discussion by stating that in most of the
nineteenth century, it is the figure of the dictator who prevailed over other

© The Author(s) 2020 443

R. T. Conn, Bolívar’s Afterlife in the Americas,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26218-1_17
444  R. T. CONN

Bolivarian embodiments. Tulio Halperín Donghi shows that this image of

the leader began to take shape in the 1820s, when liberal constitutionalists
decried Bolívar’s “military excesses” in order to limit the authority of the
Argentine military, which enjoyed no small prestige and promised to gain
even more, having come into being a little more than a decade earlier to
repel the British from the Buenos Aires port.2 To that conception of
Bolívar was added another by the liberal Domingo Faustino Sarmiento
who in the new context that was the 1830s and 1840s calls upon the fig-
ure of Bolívar in his campaign to sway public opinion against the governor
of the Argentine Confederation, Juan Manuel de Rosas. Fashioning
Bolívar not as a military leader who overstepped his office but as one who
was worthy of admiration much like San Martín, Sarmiento presents him
as a practitioner of an art of war, one that was innovative and as such in
accord with the romantic category of originality underlying his conception
of America. Here, in opposition to Rosas and his brethren, was a Bolívar
symbolic of the real military leaders of the Americas, the ones from whose
sword the new nations were descended.
Our story, however, really begins in 1887 when one of Rosas’s many
enemies, Bartolomé Mitre, who went on to become president between
1862 and 1868 of the newly consolidated republic and who brought to an
end Argentina’s 50-year Civil War, publishes his three-volume monumen-
tal history about San Martín, creating a vision of the Argentine hero and
Bolívar that would serve as a starting point for future interpreters from the
River Plate area. About Mitre’s history, Halperín Donghi makes two criti-
cal points: the first that the historian-president sought to debunk Bolívar;
the second that, while he wrote a history without bibliographical citation,
deviating thus from the new standard for the production of history set
forth by the German historian Leopold von Ranke of whom we have spo-
ken, particularly in Chap. 11 in regard to Gerhard Masur, he was in the
end true to Ranke. The fact is he was using sources in evidence when he
was engaged in conversation and debate with others, sources that con-
sisted not only of letters, but also of eyewitness accounts and of hearsay as
Mitre was able to interview actors from that period who were still alive.3
The first certainly was true: Bolívar comes out significantly diminished in
the narrative. The second must be made sense of, as Halperín Donghi is
obviously finessing Mitre’s relationship to Ranke, who called for historians
to search out archives for the materials that would serve as primary sources.
We will say more later about this invisible legacy of primary sources which
Halperín Donghi describes as “a systematic imprecision,”4 but if Mitre was
 17  BOLÍVAR IN THE RÍO DE LA PLATA  445

not using primary sources or doing so differently, there is no disputing

that he was in the end borrowing from Ranke. Not his scholarly vision of
the archive, but something else. What Mitre takes is Ranke’s concept of
restoration which the German thinker based on the new Europe he saw
emerging after the repression of the 1848 revolts in Europe, a Europe that
incorporated elements of the demands for equality and liberty that had
been put forward but brutally denied, and that constituted the legacy of a
French Revolution that had gone astray, descending into violence with
Napoleon to follow, then the 1815 Treaty of Vienna. In the case of Mitre,
the moment of Argentina’s restoration is the post-Rosas period that was
his and which he sought to represent as a moment of integration of insti-
tutional forces, forces that had resulted in conflict and violence but that
now could find an adequate peaceful embodiment, to cite again, as we did
in our discussion of Masur, the intellectual historian Hayden White.5 But
the even bigger view that Halperín Donghi offers in his study of the cen-
trality of the “foreigner” Bolívar in Argentina’s nineteenth century is that
Mitre established for the Argentine tradition the Bolívar-San Martín
binary from the perspective of a particular historiographical tradition. Still,
as important as this insight is, this fact alone tells us less than one might
think. Left unexamined is the over-arching question of how Mitre, pub-
lisher of the nation’s most important newspaper, used the dyad from
within the paradigm of Ranke; and why he created an Argentine-centered
continental and hemispheric narrative in which San Martín figured promi-
nently as part of a movement with origins in Europe.
Motivating Mitre to fashion this narrative are three things: first, the desire
to create a historiographical tradition worthy of the new Argentina with its
tremendous economic and intellectual resources; second, the desire to com-
pete with the Venezuelan state, which had been organizing itself around the
figure of Bolívar since the 1870s; third, the extraordinary success of his own
newspaper founded in 1870, La Nación, in which Spanish-language writers
from across Latin America, including most famously, José Martí, were pub-
lishing. Does this mean that Bolívar always comes out the worse? Not at all.
Mitre, in fact, recognizes San Martín’s counterpart and “Other” as being
more significant, though not for his innate heroism and intellectual prowess,
which San Martín would seem to embody more fully, but rather because of
the undeniable fact that Bolívar has gone down in history as Latin America’s
most important figure, the one who carried out the final stage of liberation.
If in the nineteenth century the new field that is the writing of history is
defined by the notion of a telos, of an ending that justifies what is narrated,
446  R. T. CONN

Mitre faced a problem: what to do with a life whose final chapter is as

ambiguous as that of San Martín?
After securing Lima, San Martín made public statements promoting
constitutional monarchy and then, subsequent to his famous meeting at
Guayaquil with Bolívar, handed to the Venezuelan the task of ridding the
entirety of Peru of the Spanish army. There is no consensus as to why San
Martín did this. He, then, made the decision to leave South America and
retire to France, accompanied by his daughter. It is true that San Martín
had been in conflict with the Buenos Aires civil elites and it is also likely
that he truly believed, as he stated, that his presence on the continent
would be a distraction to the final push for liberation. Whatever the exact
reason for his decision to remove himself from the military process and
from the continent, this was a less-than-perfect, if not less-than-noble, end
to a glorious military career, one that saw the leader build a vast, profes-
sional army, take it across the Andes into Chile, defeat there the Spanish,
and then go by ship to Peru, the center of Spain’s colonial empire, to
occupy Lima, thereby securing, or at least take a major step in securing,
the southern portion of the hemisphere.
In an important sense, then, Mitre must resurrect San Martín. To do so, he
performs a number of interpretive operations. First and foremost, he avails
himself of nineteenth-century historiography’s belief in historical laws, pre-
senting the major leaders of independence with the notable exception of
Bolívar as part of one and the same ideological process—the mostly textless
movement that was freemasonry.6 The Venezuelan leader is, indeed, an anti-
hero. Mitre, early in his narrative, takes advantage of the writings of Bolívar’s
detractors, in particular those of Ducoudray-­Holstein, to tell the reader that
Bolívar betrayed Francisco de Miranda—defined, significantly, by Argentine
Mitre as a leader of freemasonry—when in 1812, and then just a colonel, he
struck a deal with the Spanish, seizing Miranda on the northern coast from
which he was about to depart and turning him into the Spanish in exchange
for safe passage for himself and his small band.7
This is particularly important, as Mitre’s objective is to establish that San
Martín was a freemason—a person who stood for the Enlightenment and
opposed monarchy—and to build around that identity an international
story of freemasonry whose driving force was in fact Bolívar’s eventual
enemy, Miranda.8 Here, the invisible source work that Halperín Donghi
seeks to explicate becomes central. Freemasonry has no written legacy. The
members of the movements’ societies guard their associations by not com-
mitting anything to writing. That understandable lack of sources together
with Mitre’s forward-moving history that supplies to Argentina through
 17  BOLÍVAR IN THE RÍO DE LA PLATA  447

freemasonry a modern intellectual San Martín would not be easy to con-

test. British historian John Lynch in his 2009 biography, San Martín:
Argentine Soldier, American Hero, refutes Mitre’s claims, pointing out the
problem Halperín Donghi had so ably finessed, namely that Mitre did not
back up his claims. Lynch, in taking on Mitre and the Argentine tradition
of reflection on San Martín that Mitre establishes, creates a new narrative
that speaks of a San Martín who understands that he will have no profes-
sional opportunities in the Spanish army once the Napoleonic conflict is
over—the fact that he is from the Americas dooming him in that hierarchi-
cal world. Therefore, he makes the decision to return to his homeland, and
most importantly for Lynch’s refutation of Mitre’s contention that San
Martín was a freemason, does not make any connections to freemasons in
Cádiz, the center of freemasonry in Mitre’s history, or in London.9
Mitre is not only concerned to construct a freemasonry legacy. In what
is a second interpretive operation, he also presents San Martín and Bolívar
as not attending to the ideals of democracy, portraying them as standing
not against the political elites of the times who are in fact grouped with
them but rather against the people and history. Independence for Mitre is
a revolution that was really two revolutions: the first against a common
enemy, Spain; the second, a reaction within its own organic elements.
The Rankian parallels are clear to view, applying to the second revolu-
tion, which is that of the new Argentine state in the making. The motor or
subject of that revolution is defined variously as public reason (la razón
pública), the embryonic organs of the new sociability (los órganos embrióni-
cos de las nueva sociabilidad), the rich mass of humanity (la masa viva), the
popular forces (las fuerzas populares), the secret forces of collective con-
sciousness (las fuerzas ocultas de las conciencias), and the collectivity (la
colectividad). Not properly acted upon from above by caudillos and politi-
cians, who fail to meet the ethical demand of public reason, acting only
mechanically and attending only to short-term goals, the revolution is
derailed, realizing itself at a later date when the elements named can be
reassembled and acted on correctly.
In what is a third move, Mitre, in order to make this argument about
the law of history, assimilates the Liberators to each other, presenting the
periods and circumstances of their final years as being alike; ignominy and
exile casting one and the same pall over the two of them. We are made to
see, then, the “lapses” of Bolívar and San Martín as comparable, with San
Martín’s controversial support of constitutional monarchy placed on the
same level as Bolívar’s controversial statements in letters in which he
448  R. T. CONN

entertains constitutional monarchy and his 1828–1830 dictatorship.10

But, interestingly, Mitre characterizes Bolívar’s “lapse” as more egregious
and consequential, though not for the reason that one disposed to such a
critique would necessarily think.
This takes us to a fourth interpretive operation: the matter of Bolívar’s
impressive body of writings, and particularly as they bear upon the leader’s
foundational discourse of americanismo. Bolívar’s texts, particularly his
Angostura Address, exhibit an authoritarian impulse, Mitre tells the reader,
reflecting who the Liberator was, the two military dictatorships over which
he presided being not a deviation from the essential figure, but the most
clear outward expression of it. In this moment, just as in many others,
Mitre is reorienting the vision of American independence such as to pres-
ent San Martín, not Bolívar, as the true American statesman. He thus gives
the Venezuelan’s writings short shrift when not discarding them alto-
gether, as when he describes the “ignominious” circumstances under
which an in-flight Bolívar produces the Jamaica Letter, now one of Latin
America’s most canonical texts. He also elaborates for the historical record,
in what may be seen as a fifth interpretive operation intended to demon-
strate the Argentine’s moral, intellectual, and political prowess, an archive
of pithy philosophical and political statements made by San Martín to take
the place of Bolívar’s.
If Mitre represents the Liberators as deviating from or betraying the doc-
trine of republicanism with San Martín a freemason, he constructs two
larger narratives in which to place that story. The first is that of democratic
resistance to the Spanish metropole, with its deep roots in acts of economic
defiance throughout Latin America. It is a story that is hemispheric in scope
in which resistance to taxation in “northern” America becomes the matrix
for the Americas writ large with Bolívar and San Martín placed alongside
George Washington, the three together presiding over a hemisphere defined
by the struggle to emancipate itself economically from the European
metropoles. But Mitre goes on to argue that the struggle for economic
resistance in the Americas is complicated in the “south” by the racial and
cultural obstacles faced by a creole class defined as “white.” As a way of
explaining away the new Latin American states’ diminished position in the
world markets in comparison to the place they occupied when they were
colonies in the eighteenth century, Mitre brutally finds a scapegoat in the
indigenous of Latin America, arguing that in the decades following inde-
pendence creoles, whether Mexican, Colombian, Argentine, or other, had
first to establish hegemony over cultures that were “non-Western.”
 17  BOLÍVAR IN THE RÍO DE LA PLATA  449

Forget Latin America’s civil wars among the creole elites, or the lock
elites had on markets and on the political offices that allowed them to take
advantage of those markets. The story of nineteenth-century Latin
American nations is that of creoles’ quest to achieve political and eco-
nomic independence in the face of what is described as a backward, reac-
tionary indigenous world. What does Mitre get from such a sweeping
racist vision apart from defending the honor of Latin America in the face
of an industrializing and growing United States? By collapsing the history
of Argentina “from its beginnings” into the racialized hemispheric he
imagines and by excising, then, those national conflicts that do not fit into
his narrative, particularly the wars between unitarios and federales of the
1810s through 1862 together with Rosas, who in fact unified the regions
of the Argentine federation while protecting them against English and
Brazilian invasion, Mitre shores up if not invents for the new Republic of
Argentina a social class and a social order that can know itself above and
beyond old political divisions.
But if “whitening” the nations of Latin America and presenting that
newly constituted subject as the people is a lot, there is more. Mitre also
would seem to want to justify or at least shunt aside the recent war waged
against Paraguay in which approximately one million indigenous people,
mostly Guaraní Indians conscripted by the Paraguay state, were merci-
lessly sent to their deaths, the Paraguayan army no match for the armies of
Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay, while also presenting the Argentine state’s
war policy against the indigenous in its own territory as historically neces-
sary. In his formulation, which mirrors that of the white, European elites
in the United States at the time, national identity is defined in opposition
to the economic backwardness of the indigenous.
As for the Lafond letter in which San Martín purportedly details his
decision to abnegate and with which Mitre’s name has been associated
because of the importance ascribed by later interpreters to his declaration
that it was authentic,11 the value he assigns to it is interesting. For, as an
Argentine, Mitre could be expected to fault Bolívar for excluding San
Martín from the final chapter of independence, as San Martín contends in
the letter, or to differentiate the two figures in accordance with their polit-
ical beliefs. But Mitre, who needs to have the two stand together as fallen
figures, will have no part of this, downplaying the drama associated with
San Martín’s decision to abnegate. Making a show of approaching the
matter with the cold gaze of the historian for whom all acts have their own
specificity in a larger scheme, he describes San Martín’s decision as the
450  R. T. CONN

result of a careful and pragmatic consideration of the conditions on the

ground at the time, not as an act of the heart, as it was for George
Washington, Mitre asserts, when he disbanded his army. San Martín, Mitre
insists, makes a tactical decision, leaving the Latin American stage to allow
Bolívar to have full authority over the remaining chapter of independence.
But the decision is historically necessary, representing the reality of the
moment, not the inner spirit of the man.12
If Mitre, in his effort to professionalize the task of the historian seeks to
show that San Martín’s decision to leave the battlefield was not something
emotional or moral but rational, he also provides justification for that
which created the conditions for San Martín and Bolívar to have their
meeting in the first place: Bolívar’s decision to enter and take the city of
Guayaquil. Pointing to Guayaquil’s century-long membership in the Vice-­
Royalty of New Granada, he describes Bolívar’s “dictatorial” actions as
being justified, the result of a new sovereign power’s prerogative to exer-
cise old colonial territorial claims—what is known as uti possidetis—in this
case over the expanse of the old Vice-Royalty. Here in his defense of
Bolívar’s “prerogative” is another instance in which we see this nineteenth-­
century historian’s desire to create a set of historical laws, this time to
explain the emergence of the territorial limits of the Gran Colombia.13 In
contrast to the historians of whom we spoke in the Introduction, the Gran
Colombia is not a necessary military device (Lynch), a reflection of
Bolívar’s dictatorial tendencies (Rodríguez O.), a symptom of the dissolu-
tion of the Spanish empire (Adelman), or an outgrowth of Enlightenment
thought (Elliott), but rather a veritable state to be taken seriously that
comes into being following the purported laws of state formation.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the process of pro-
moting San Martín as a national hero would see the dedication of parks
and statues as well as the publication of books by philologists and scholars
detailing his military acts and thought. Promoting him beyond Argentine
borders as an international leader, as Mitre does, would be more complex
and in fact not until the early 1930s did anyone in Argentina try their hand
at presenting him in a manner as ambitious as we have seen in the case of
Mitre. As we have noted in Chap. 10, Manuel Ugarte, in 1910, used the
Bolívar-San Martín pairing to create a narrative to oppose the hemi-
spheric aspirations of the Pan American Union. But in the years ahead,
with Pan Americanism, the Mexican Revolution (1910–1917), the dicta-
torship of Vicente Gómez (1908–1935), and the World War (1914–1918),
intellectuals in Argentina and the rioplatense did not hesitate to use Bolívar
as a symbol, embodying as he did for them the values they sought to pro-
 17  BOLÍVAR IN THE RÍO DE LA PLATA  451

mote. It was not just that Bolívar had texts that were in circulation and San
Martín did not (though there was Romualdo de la Fuente’s Biografía del
ilustre general americano don José de San Martín resumida de documentos
auténticos (Biography of the Illustrious American General don José de San
Martín Summarized Through Authentic Documents), published in Paris
1868).14 It was also that Bolívar’s vast writings together with his multiple
acts over the course of 20 years that involved military action, constitution
writing and congresses—lent themselves, as we have seen throughout this
book—to the possibility of forming a basis for narratives concerning state
formation.
The Uruguayan writer José Enrique Rodó, as seen in his essay on
Montalvo that we discussed in Chap. 13, and his 1900 essay, Ariel, to which
we made mention in Chap. 8, can be regarded as an historian of the nine-
teenth century, a figure who reached beyond the borders of his region in an
effort to position the humanities such as to resignify them as constituting a
space for the careful and painstaking labor necessary for the forging of soci-
eties. Bolívar provided him with the perfect space in which to do this, the
larger-than-life reconquistador, maker, originator, and founder of the Latin
American republics whose acts, including his literary ones, are unrepeatable,
having served their glorious function, but having no value for the present.
Rodó published his essay entitled “Bolívar” in 1913 as a prologue to an edi-
tion of Bolívar’s writings prepared in Paris by Rufino Blanco Fombona and
also that same year as part of an extensive collection of his writings contain-
ing 45 of his essays.15 Also in 1913, as we saw in Chap. 15, the Argentine
intellectual José Ingenieros brought out El hombre mediocre in which he
speaks positively of Bolívar. Bolívar furnishes Rodó with a space in which to
perform a transference of sorts—the humanities going from the domain of
literary groups and of political parties to the domain of the pedagogue, with
the classics transformed along with all of literature into an informal or for-
mal field of study for learning the values necessary for productive citizenship.
Rodó wrote as insider and outsider with regard to the Argentine tradi-
tion, using elements from the Venezuelan and Argentine understandings
of his figure to do so. On the one hand, he presents the Libertador as a
genius whose story is similar to that of other so-called superior creators,
characterized, as he imagines them, as individuals capable of extraordinary
triumphs. His scope is immense. For Rodó, Bolívar is a figure representa-
tive of the entirety of Latin America, one who is defined not simply by his
commitment to the Andean multi-national projects of the Gran Colombia
and the Andean Federation, but also by the fact of emblematizing the
beginnings of the story of liberty in all of Latin America, a leader who
452  R. T. CONN

never stopped thinking about uniting the region in a fraternity of nations

and in whom was stored, then released, the spontaneity of ten generations
suppressed under the colonial yoke. On the other hand, he compares him
to San Martín, defining the two as corresponding to universal moral arche-
types. Bolívar represents that of ambition, and San Martín that of abnega-
tion. This is a binary that was already in the Argentine tradition but that
had not been raised up to serve to distinguish the two in the definitive
terms we see here, now given to us in the symbolic logic that defined the
turn-of-the century movement known as modernismo and in which Rodó
was one of the major actors. He also brings the two forth according to
another binary. He describes Bolívar as modern, a defender of the doctrine
of liberalism, while he presents San Martín as just the opposite.
The Uruguayan writer is reframing the Argentine tradition, just as he
has earlier the US American tradition in Ariel. In Ariel he depicts the US
American tradition as less universal than many would claim, celebrating its
“founding fathers” but critiquing it for what it becomes in the Gilded Age
with the concentration of exorbitant wealth in the new industrialists, the
so-called robber barons as dubbed by critics. In the new essay, he submits
that in the River Plate area, the political tradition derived from indepen-
dence has to be revised. San Martín, committed as he was to the doctrine
of the old order, is insufficient as a national or regional model. But all is
not lost. Add to the equation the founder of Uruguay, José Gervasio
Artigas, whom the Argentine humanist Ricardo Rojas describes as having
had no good reason to break off from the territory comprehended by the
old Vice-Royalty of the River Plate. Now, we have a composite equal to
that of Bolívar, with San Martín only partially representing the spirit of the
southern cone region, sharing that spirit with the “upstart” Artigas.
The Uruguayan Rodó was responding to the Argentine Rojas by cele-
brating Artigas as the one of the two who was modern. Still, the figure of
which Artigas and San Martín are a composite—Rodó’s Latin Americanized
Bolívar—is not a perfect leader. Viewed carefully, he was guilty of certain
missteps or errors, all magnified by his greatness. The most significant, we
are led to believe, is his decision to declare the dictatorship of 1828. How
Rodó simultaneously critiques and glorifies him, then, is worthy of our
consideration.
An Argentine reader could sense she is on familiar ground as she follows
the Uruguayan writer’s portrait, even after Rodó praises Bolívar for his
denunciation of the Mexican Iturbide when the latter declares himself
 17  BOLÍVAR IN THE RÍO DE LA PLATA  453

emperor. Bolívar later defends Iturbide, rebuking those who decided on

the death sentence, including Vicente Guerrero. But that perception—that
the figure being portrayed is the dictator—will have completely faded by
the end of the essay. For here, in what is meant as a culmination in the story
of Bolívar’s political education—the author finding examples for pedagogic
uplift wherever he can—Rodó unequivocally celebrates the Liberator for
not accepting General Rafael Urdaneta’s invitation in September and
October of 1830 to return to power, this after Urdaneta’s September 4
coup against President Joaquín Mosquera. Bolívar had ended his provi-
sional dictatorship of 1828–1830, called El Congreso Admirable, seen
another voted president (Mosquera), and witnessed from afar the assassina-
tion of Antonio José de Sucre. Bolívar, we could say, has learned his lesson.
He will not seek to declare a dictatorship—assuming such an act could even
be possible by one in his physical condition—as he had on August 27, 1828.
But if Rodó is turning the Argentine version of Bolívar inside out, we
also see him present Bolívar as a caudillo, though in unquestionably posi-
tive terms, characterizing the charismatic function associated with the cau-
dillo as necessary to the building of a revolutionary movement. To do this,
he blends together Argentine and Venezuelan history, defining the llane-
ros (plainsmen) of Venezuela as equivalent to the gauchos (like cowboy but
different) of Argentina, while comparing Bolívar to a Juan Manuel Rosas
or a Facundo (the caudillo immortalized by the Argentine writer Domingo
Faustino Sarmiento), the basis for the comparison to these two being the
dominating personality. The fact of dominating men through charisma,
that is, by force of one’s personality interests Rodó who presents this as
the first stage in the constitution of a national political body—what he calls
that of vulgar democracy, defined as the shaping of the masses of the coun-
tryside whom he likens to the creative but anarchic forces of Nature. The
authority that issues forth from the attempt at controlling those forces,
fountains of popular sentiment, is seen as crucial to the success of a politi-
cal movement. Bolívar, Rodó asserts, gave himself up to those forces; San
Martín did not. But Bolívar did not do so immediately. It was not until
1817 and 1818, when he has returned from the Caribbean to recover his
honor, as Rodó puts it—using Mitre’s vision of a cowardly Bolívar who
leaves the mainland in 1815—that he becomes a true leader. Bolívar,
whom Rodó describes as an Alcibiades—the Athenian leader known for
his ­cunning, eloquence, wealth, and life of loose morals—will now be even
more like Sarmiento’s Rosas, a figure who is of the city and also of the
country, able to dominate in both spaces. Rodó writes: “In the vast plains
454  R. T. CONN

of the Apure he lives and serves with those primitive and genial irregular
soldiers that later will provide him with the ones who will follow him in his
crossing of the Andes and will form the vanguard with which he will be
victorious at Carabobo.”16 Having Americanized himself by becoming of
the people, Bolívar embodies the energy of the revolution; San Martín, far
from emerging from American conditions on the ground, could have been
any old leader from Europe.17
In his inquiry into his lapses, Rodó also presents Bolívar as a multifac-
eted man, a statesman and a writer whose dictatorship ultimately did not
weaken the republican tradition, and who, furthermore, operated under
great psychological duress and in a context of no small complexity, finding
himself without assistance from those who surrounded him, and having,
in fact, to combat and contain the political visions of others, including that
of Páez who insisted on adopting a monarchy. But it was not only forces
as represented by Páez and other figures that Bolívar had to contain, Rodó
submits. His Bolívar, who will now seem the very embodiment of Hegel’s
notion of the idea becoming flesh, must also preside over powerful forces
from within himself, or, as he calls them, taking from the field of psychol-
ogy, as he did throughout his essays, energies. If Bolívar’s multifacetness is
the result of those energies, there are also results that are negative, as the
said energies cannot be prevented from pushing across the boundaries of
different spheres. Bolívar, as the embodiment of the Hegelian idea, finds
himself overstepping his authority or not excelling in one individual sphere
as he might, the process of becoming what he became involving a certain
unavoidable messiness. He was destined to be a hero, Rodó tells us, not a
political administrator, though he was competent enough.18
Rodó, who praises Bolívar’s letters, calling them literary for their spon-
taneity and intimateness while describing his political documents as classi-
cism in the form of propaganda, has managed to interiorize the battle
between authoritarianism or militarism, on the one hand, and liberalism
and the humanities on the other. Bolívar can be looked back upon as sig-
nifying a period unto himself in which heroism was necessary, a vision of
Latin America’s beginnings that can serve to synchronize those of all the
Latin American republics and define for them the proper way to under-
stand and administer the world of letters in the republics where what is
central is creating citizens and good government. The modern state, as
Rodó tells, though, needs slow and deliberate effort within the context of
good administration.
 17  BOLÍVAR IN THE RÍO DE LA PLATA  455

Rodó was responding, as we have said, to the Argentine humanist

Ricardo Rojas. He elevated Artigas. The ball is now back in the court of
Rojas, who does not allow San Martín to be diminished. In 1916, he pub-
lished La argentinidad (The Argentine Character) using Herder’s model
of a volk literature to reconstruct the story of independence as a bottom-
up process. He describes San Martín as a figure civilian in spirit whose
abnegation reflected a principle that was part of the region’s democratic
process, namely military leaders resigning and returning to civilian life
after victory and success, rather than seeking greater authority, the prin-
ciple illustrated by the fact that those who did not resign were eventually
put down.19 But as soon as Rojas brought out the tome, he would feel
compelled to adjust his construction of San Martín and Bolívar. The claims
he made for Argentina as a nation whose independence process was one of
democratic hemispheric action, its Congreso de Tucumán a forerunner of
Bolívar’s Congreso de Panamá, and its pronouncements against the mon-
archies of Europe comparable to the Monroe Doctrine, had, in his mind,
been undermined by what he saw as President Hipólito Yrigoyen’s shame-
ful decision to remain neutral in the Great War. The texts in which he rails
against Yrigoyen and Argentina begin to appear in 1916 and are brought
out as a single volume in 1924, titled La guerra de las naciones (Wars of
Nations). In that edition, Rojas writes:

But I believe, on the other hand, that the prestige of our nation has already
been sullied: and when we Argentines, proud of our epic story of indepen-
dence, now travel in América and say as we have been accustomed to in the
past: ‘It is we who in 1810 guided the epic that was American indepen-
dence,’ a voice will respond to us: ‘Yes, but in 1917 you did nothing for
human liberty. Between the blood-thirsty Kaiser and a humanity desirous of
being free; between the aggressor empire and your banner sunk in the
ocean, you chose neutrality.’20

Focusing in this way on Yrigoyen’s decision that divided intellectuals,

himself in the camp of the leader’s critics, Rojas goes on to speak of the
need to restore Argentina’s international reputation and to do so by
regenerating the country from within. Regeneration, the concept that
underlies his different projects, he now submits, depends on the agency
of the youth, a category of political engagement that had long been in
the Latin American tradition, as seen in the writings of Ecuadorian
Roberto Andrade, and most famously, José Enrique Rodó’s Ariel. The
456  R. T. CONN

youth, Rojas tells his readers, will have the task of correcting the mis-
takes of the previous generation by creating a nation led by elites who
are international in spirit as opposed to cosmopolitan, the latter term
designating for him the sphere of High Culture, and who, accordingly,
organize the nation around a civic idea. The nation that most completely
represents the model he has in mind is the United States, whose culture
he sees as being rooted in one text, the Bible, with the voices of Whitman,
Emerson, and Wilson the secular realization of it. All three represent a
model of citizenship based on the spirit of self-sacrifice.21
During this time, San Martín is not spoken of while Bolívar is, his dream
of federation used as a model of a properly federated Argentine state with
the parts working in unison with the whole. Change, though, came again.
Throughout his long and prolific career as professor at the University of
Buenos Aires and chancellor of the university between 1926 and 1930,
Rojas sought to guide the development of the Argentine nation by produc-
ing histories instituting the values of a modern educated citizenry.22
The year 1930 saw a bloodless military coup that ended the second
term of the democratically elected Hipólito Yrigoyen, of whom, as we
have said, Rojas had been extremely critical, just as many others from the
time had been, concerned, evidently, that his mental faculties were being
diminished by aging. In response, the highly respected academic, not
known for intervening directly in national politics, declared himself a
member of the party of Yrigoyen and mocked the military’s move to hold
new elections, issuing the statement that no candidate should participate
under conditions in which fraud is all but assured, a statement that hear-
kened back to Yrigoyen’s defining stance as the leader of the Radical
Party—non-participation in elections characterized by fraud. His state-
ments landed him briefly in prison. In response to the coup, as scholars
have stated, but also in reaction to the spate of writings on the subject of
Bolívar in the late 1920s in connection to the 1930 centenary celebration
of the Venezuelan’s death, which in the Pan American United States were
extensive, Rojas published in 1933 his famous tome about San Martín, El
santo de la espada, translated into English as San Martín, Knight of
the Andes.23
The book is hardly distinguishable as a clear outcry. For Rojas, who
conceived the written tradition as rising above politics, uses the occasion
of the drafting of his tome on San Martín not to attack the Argentine mili-
tary and the social classes supporting it explicitly, but instead to lay out a
liberal cultural framework through which to understand the Argentine
 17  BOLÍVAR IN THE RÍO DE LA PLATA  457

hero and with this to defend the wholeness of a nation perhaps discredited
in the eyes of the international world by the coup. Rojas’s San Martín is
different from Mitre’s military leader who, like Bolívar, betrays the people
in the 1820s, in his case through his defense of constitutional monarchy,
and from Rojas’s earlier Pan American version, that of the figure who
resigns for the greater good of independence and/or the defense of the
civilian sphere over the military. For that matter, it could not be more dif-
ferent from the version worked out by Rodó, who speaks of a San Martín
who fails in his efforts to hold together the Peruvian elites. San Martín is
now, as only a literary scholar of the caliber of Rojas could make him,
defined not by his meeting with Bolívar at Guayaquil, but by the epic
breadth of a life with a beginning, a middle, and an end. To produce his
story, Rojas weaves together a number of cultural models, describing San
Martín in the first chapter of that life as being like Odysseus or a medieval
knight, valiantly and selflessly returning to his homeland, while also char-
acterizing him as a person of humble background who was self-made, the
resonance to the French novelist Stendhal’s upstart who stands against the
old regime clear to view. But he is hardly Napoleon, possessing his own
international spirit, having participated in and witnessed the historic events
of the 1790s and 1800s in Europe. There are other comparisons. Rojas,
taking from Mitré, portrays San Martín as a leader in the mold of the
Venezuelan Francisco de Miranda who soaks up the ideas of his age and
participates, as he imagines both San Martín and Miranda to have, in the
so-called workshops of the masons. Continuing to show how San Martín
is modern, Rojas states that he is also a person capable of starting all over
for an ideal, giving up everything he had achieved as a member of the
King’s army to return to the Americas, to oppose the armies in which he
had distinguished himself. Finally, in his last important move in this sec-
tion, Rojas presents San Martín as a leader who, in opposition to Bolívar,
brings a model of liberty to the regions of Latin America that recognized
their intrinsic sovereignty, always respectful of the institutions of the ter-
ritories he entered rather than forcing them, as Bolívar did, to form part
of a larger union:

It has justly been said that he Americanized the Argentine revolution, and
it would be equally true that his patriotism was American. …The
Americanist vision of Bolívar was, in addition, of an imperialist kind, while
the Sanmartinian embodiment respected the autonomous modality of
each people.24
458  R. T. CONN

Jumping forward, forget the vexing matter of San Martín’s premature

departure from the scene of independence. Rojas will turn the Guayaquil
meeting to his advantage, confirming the veracity of the letter written by
San Martín and transcribed by Lafond, with no original copy in existence
(the so-called Lafond letter). In this letter—to say more—San Martín
expresses to Bolívar his deep disappointment at the Liberator’s refusal to
accept his offer to join forces with him and serve under his command, a
decision that put San Martín in the situation of having to resign and leave
the battlefield entirely to Bolívar. Mitre, who, as we have said, certified the
validity of the letter, refuses to speak in moral terms about Bolivar’s deci-
sion not to allow San Martín to serve under him, underlining instead the
facts of power. Rojas goes in the opposite direction, using the Lafond let-
ter to make Bolívar into the Other of San Martín—conniving and sensual.
He speaks of Bolívar’s tropical, Dionysian self-absorbed arrogance and
Machiavellianism and San Martín’s upright self-sacrificing commitment to
unity and cooperation, as well as of San Martín’s courage, intelligence,
and judgment, with San Martín’s contributions to Bolívar’s and Sucre’s
victories at Riobamba and Pichincha highlighted for the reader.25 The
Guayaquil meeting acquires new importance, serving as a moment in
which a national hero demonstrates unmatched virtue.
But we have gotten ahead of ourselves, the 1822 Guayaquil meeting
coming later in Rojas’s narrative. As for the middle phase of San Martín’s
life, which is the war years in the Americas, we see a figure whose modesty,
courage, intelligence, and judgment had already been established during
the decades he served in the King’s army, and who, indeed, lives by a code
derived from the ideals, rules, and protocols of the freemasons. All this is
clear to view at his first battle after returning to Buenos Aires and may also
be seen, of course, in Cuyo, the site where he established his famed expe-
ditionary army. In Cuyo, far away from the intrigue of the city, San Martín
builds from scratch, and with little financial assistance from Buenos Aires,
we are told, a potent and efficient army based on his unique ability to
attract and incorporate individuals of merit. Just as important as his prow-
ess as a strategist, then, he is an exceptional leader around whom soldiers
and officers rally, following him because of the knightly idea of self-sacri-
fice he represents.
This new rendering of San Martín is extremely important, for the
leader, when compared to the San Martín of Mitre or Rojas’s own earlier
accounts, is characterized not as a counterpart to Bolívar and Washington
but rather as one who occupies his own narrative frame, the epic bearer of
a European, in particular, a Hispanic cultural spirit. Rojas’s San Martín is
 17  BOLÍVAR IN THE RÍO DE LA PLATA  459

a self-reflective, self-sacrificing leader who is like Odysseus, as we have said,

courageously leaving behind his mother and brothers to set out on an
uncertain voyage.
Now Rojas, just as other Latin American writers and intellectuals do at
different times in the first half of the twentieth century, as we have
observed throughout this book, turns to the category of the Hispanic,
using it to position Argentina in world culture. In fact, Rojas will com-
pare San Martín to El Cid, presenting him as a hero who just like the
Spanish epic hero disobeys earthly authority—that of the political elites of
Buenos Aires, who in 1820 order him to return with his army to fight
regional caudillos—for the purpose of the greater good, the liberation of
Chile and Peru. They will not forgive him for his disobedience.26 But this
epic hero is also 100% autochthonous, meaning that he is of Argentina,
having been born, we are told in the first pages, in a small town in Yapeyú,
Corrientes before moving to Spain as a young man with his parents, serv-
ing in the king’s army, and soaking up European culture while becoming
an affiliate of freemasonry.
In engaging with the middle phase of his career, Rojas also addresses
San Martín’s sexual being and relationship to his family. Playing to the
ideals of Argentina’s middle and working classes, presents San Martín as
never accepting the advances of the many women who purportedly offered
themselves to him, always true to the young wife who saw him off to
battle, the scene of departure as heart wrenching as El Cid’s farewell to his
spouse, we are told. San Martín’s wife is selfless as well, spending her
youth without him only to die just before his return. On the subject of
Rosa Campusano, he calls her Egeria, the divine consort and counselor of
the second Sabine king. Rojas bases his treatment of San Martín’s relation-
ship to Rosa Campusano using the tradiciones of Ricardo Palma of which
we have spoken in Chap. 16. Citing them, he affirms Campusano’s politi-
cal influence for independence but he finesses in this way her sexual rela-
tionship to San Martín, making Campusano a platonic or divine
inspiration.27 Rojas’s vision of San Martín was inspired by the Spanish and
Western classical traditions.
But there is more as we move into the final phase of San Martín’s mili-
tary career that is the fraught discursive space of his retirement, which now
becomes much longer with the decisive moment being not Guayaquil but
February 10, 1824, when San Martín leaves Buenos Aires with his daugh-
ter. He has decided to expatriate himself from Buenos Aires. Rojas pres-
ents San Martín as a tragic figure who is like Bolívar, a victim of calumny
and shunned by local political elites in Buenos Aires who are eager to
460  R. T. CONN

punish him for his acts of “disobedience,” irrationally fearful that he will
lead a coup against them to bring order to the political process, as other
leaders of independence would in their respective territories. San Martín’s
refusal to use his army for civil war in 1820 is to be understood as a cri-
tique, the military having been called upon by the upper classes in 1930 to
remove a president and having agreed to do their bidding. San Martín has
been endowed with a new ending: the individual who understands the
proper use of military force and who is brave and strong enough to stand
up for his principles.
That is not all for Rojas, who has provided the Argentine public with a
heroically disobedient national hero to shame the contemporary upper
classes and military. Facing off in the late 1930s and 1940s with Vicente
Lecuna, of whose project we spoke at length in Chap. 5, Rojas continues
to build his ideological machine in response to the perceived needs of
Argentina, now turning his attention to defending San Martín against
Venezuelan interpreters and to this end carefully transforming the texts
produced about the meeting of Bolívar and San Martín at Guayaquil into
an archive. We are now seeing the other side of that quarrel. The point of
contention, which he claims to resolve by way of thorough analysis and
objective critique, was the thesis advanced by Lecuna, namely that the
storied, allegedly undocumented conversations between Bolívar and San
Martín were shrouded in mystery and destined to remain so, there being
no witnesses to what the two said to each other and there being no text
produced by them. The texts that exist about the meeting are compro-
mised by the fact that they had been created by individuals who had not
themselves been in attendance, including most famously or notoriously,
depending on one’s perspective, Lafond—the Frenchman to whom San
Martín allegedly sent a copy of the letter along with other documents
when Lafond requested materials for a history he was writing—as well as
two purportedly opportunistic secretaries of Bolívar who sought to benefit
from their former positions.
Another point of contention, the result of his adoption of the new her-
meneutic, was Rojas’s El santo de la espada, which in the face of criticism
from local intellectual foes he would be asked to reconcile with his new
critical standard.
Truth and falsehood: here is the axis along which Rojas understood the
matter of the interview at Guayaquil. The author of El santo de la espada,
in raising the Guayaquil texts to the status of an archive, now sought to
reconcile his new “scientific” understanding of truth based on the recov-
ery of “texts” and their “contexts” with the idea of truth or history under-
 17  BOLÍVAR IN THE RÍO DE LA PLATA  461

lying his biography of San Martín. To this end, he presents his El santo de
la espada less as a narrative willing a particular understanding of San
Martín within a specific cultural framework than as a work developed
exclusively from careful documentation of citations. The writing of history
is a process defined by rigorous and painstaking source work instead of a
creative act based on the politics of culture, Rojas now seems to affirm. As
for the view of San Martín as a leader that Rojas sought? That changed too
with the rise of Mussolini and Hitler. Rojas now characterizes San Martín
as a leader with a vision of the state, one that was a counter model to those
of the times, particularly that of the demagogue fascist leader. The public
of the twentieth century not disposed to seeing the difference between
absolute and constitutional monarchy, he refers only to the first, present-
ing it as that which San Martín opposed. He explains that San Martín was
a figure who stood for the rule of law and education; who refused to play
the role of caudillo; and who opposed monarchy, upper-class privilege,
and populist political concepts of power. Whether it was the Venezuelan
Gómez, the Argentine military leaders of the 1930s, or the international
fascist leaders of the 1930s and 1940s, the caudillo or demagogue with his
fawning masses was precisely what Rojas tells readers the “non-monar-
chist” San Martín was not:

With this book in hand, supported by documentary citations, I affirm one

more time that San Martín was not a monarchist. To the contrary, he was
revolutionary; a republican who wanted to reconcile authority and liberty,
through the law. He desired that the regime of independent America be
based on the civic awareness of the citizens, which, he stated, the Spanish
American colonies lacked. He detested the ignorant masses, the unruly sol-
diers, the sensual oligarchies, all fodder for adventurous politicians. In a
word: a military leader who did not want to be a caudillo, a statesman who
did not want to be a demagogue.28

In his series of responses to Lecuna, which grew into a defense of the

“discipline” of history as an activity in the service of “truth” in contra-
distinction to the notion of history as narrative, responses which he pub-
lished as one volume in 1947 with the title La entrevista de guayaquil
(The Interview at Guayaquil), Rojas maintains that “historical truth”
could in fact be scientifically v­ erified through a careful and informed
consideration of the sources and of the character of all the individuals
involved, including third parties.29 Here, among other things, he makes
a new argument for the authenticity of the Lafond letter, appealing to
the public world of print and discourse and demonstrating that San
462  R. T. CONN

Martín in at least two instances had the occasion to pass judgment on

the veracity of the letter. The first was when he would have seen it as
published text in the travel narrative, Voyages, which was authored by
Lafond and personally sent to him; this was hardly the nondescript sailor
spoken of by others but the author of a book, no less, and furthermore,
as we also learn from Rojas, son of a letrado.30 The second was when he
would have heard Sarmiento speak about it and other documents in
public at the French Institute in Paris. Rojas underscores that on neither
occasion did San Martín deny the letter’s authenticity.
The last individual we shall consider is the Argentine writer Jorge Luis
Borges, who in his short story “Guayaquil,” published in El informe de
Brodie (Brodies’s Report) in 1970, makes the figure of San Martín come to
life in the context of the meeting in Guayaquil and the Lafond letter.31
Borges is not concerned to settle the matter of who is more important by
giving, for example, a prominent place to each, or privileging the one over
the other, particularly San Martín, whom as an Argentine he could be
obliged to choose, but rather to produce a story about the social and insti-
tutional conditions regulating and limiting inquiry into the past. Those
who know Borges will not be surprised. His story slowly becomes a par-
ody of the “scholarly” debate concerning Guayaquil just as another story
of his, “The Gospel According to Mark,” becomes one of its master texts.
The parallel he fleshes out in the course of the narrative is situational
and dialogic.
Two scholars, desirous of examining and transcribing a recently
“exhumed” letter allegedly written by Bolívar, find themselves reproduc-
ing the situation of San Martín and Bolívar on July 27, 1822, the moment
of the famous interview between the two when both are poised, at least
according to the Argentine version, to prosecute the final stage of the war
in Peru. In the first paragraph of the story, in the high-sounding, monu-
mental tone of a lament, the narrator tells us that, contrary to what he had
expected, he will not go to the places he has imagined and transcribe the
letter of Bolívar. In the second paragraph, however, in what amounts to an
about-face with regard to the “melancholic” and “pompous” tone in
which he has begun to describe the occurrence, the narrator promises to
render an honest, unsentimental account of the so-called episode, to
­confess all that occurred in order to understand exactly what happened in
the course of his interview with the scholar from the University of the
South. The portrait that emerges is that of an individual desirous of under-
standing how he has suddenly gone from wanting nothing more than to
 17  BOLÍVAR IN THE RÍO DE LA PLATA  463

have the opportunity to transcribe the Bolívar letter—the culminating act

of his professional career, as he sees it—to “voluntarily” having the other
scholar take his place.32
Indeed, if the story of Guayaquil is in part that of a “loser” restored to
national history by the Lafond letter, as seems to be the premise of
Colombres Mármol, who brings out in 1940 the edition claiming to con-
tain the original letter sent by San Martín to Bolívar, in the personal
account given to us by the narrator about his interview, nothing is pro-
vided that could serve to elevate that narrator in the minds of his readers.
On the contrary, we learn in his “confession” that he has been “van-
quished” by a scholar, Zimmerman, whom he regards as his social and
racial inferior. How that scholar vanquishes him has everything to do with
persuasion or human psychology. Much like Poe’s Dupin in The Purloined
Letter, Zimmerman knows that to defeat his foe, he needs to understand
his psychological make-up, which means understanding his hopes and his
fears. As we know from the work of critics like Sylvia Molloy, Beatiz Sarlo,
and Roberto Schwarz, in Borges’s stories, it is commonly the figure from
the margins or the figure outside the nation who is able to understand the
dynamics of modernity or in relation to whom we see those dynamics at
work. Here, Borges’s Zimmerman embodies that figure as well as any one
of Borges’s characters.
Zimmerman has fled Nazi Germany and has lived in Argentina for some
time, imperfectly acculturated much like the gaucho peons, the Gutres, in
the “The Gospel According to Mark,” but obviously in a completely dif-
ferent context. When he tells the narrator that the person who publishes
the letter will be identified with it by the public, no matter his position on
its veracity or authenticity, he is playing on his foe’s greatest fear: the sul-
lying or compromising of the distinguished name of his family, which
includes an ancestor who fought in the wars of independence. Of course,
Zimmerman could not be more of an “outsider”: a victim in Germany of
Martin Heidegger, who discovered a work of his on Semitic Carthage and
denounced him as a Jew; in Argentina, an immigrant who stands in the
margins of the nation, as Jewish peoples did during these times in western
nations and in some cases still do. His skin color; his imperfect mastery of
Spanish; and his clothing represent so many annoyances to the narrator,
who sees him not as a citizen, as he in fact was, but as a guest (huéspued)
or foreigner (extranjero). In the end, the ruse works: the narrator, who has
been asked by the Argentine ambassador to meet with Zimmerman in
order to set things straight about who will go, is made to feel fearful of the
464  R. T. CONN

consequences that might befall the scholar whose name is associated with
that of Bolívar. Of his ability to instill in him that fear, Zimmerman had
been certain, drawing up before the meeting a letter to be signed by the
narrator authorizing him to take his place and purchasing an airline ticket
that the narrator glimpses in his briefcase. Zimmerman will go in search of
professional glory, having used to his advantage his knowledge of the
dynamics of Argentine culture, while the narrator will stay behind, unwill-
ing now after his encounter with Zimmerman to risk bringing into disre-
pute the family name.
With this, Borges reenacts in new terms the historic debate about the
Guayaquil meeting, just as he does the Gospel in his story, “The Gospel
According to Mark”: both stories that localize universal paradigms.
History repeats itself as a set of banalities having to do with one party’s
ability to take advantage of another, particularly of that person’s moral
frailty. The narrator’s sense of himself as custodian of the Argentine tradi-
tion manifests in his utter fear of being considered anything less by the
public and the establishment. Borges is isolating as an object of inquiry a
particular human condition, elevating it by referencing, as he does in the
final pages, the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer who famously
writes in his 1851 “The Wisdom of Life” that “most men set the utmost
value precisely on what other people think, and are more concerned about
it than about what goes on in their own consciousness, which is the thing
most immediately and directly present to them.”33
But, in addition, Borges is interrogating a national tradition that cannot
conceive of San Martín as anything other than the self-sacrificing hero who
rejects “mere ambition” for the good of the continent. That parochialism
is seen in the narrator himself, who is head of the Department of American
History but who despite his academic location in a discipline whose object
is the history of all of Latin America does no more than parrot the canoni-
cal Argentine version of San Martín, only to be informed of other versions
by the “foreign” scholar. Borges never references the Lafond letter, but we
know that the conception of San Martín as self-sacrificing is based on it and
we also know that Zimmerman is conjuring it for the patrician narrator
when he presents him with the possibility that the letter allegedly written
by Bolívar could forever bear his name, just as the one allegedly written by
San Martín and transcribed by Lafond has for so many decades borne that
of the latter. Borges’s approach to the debate could thus not have been
more different from that of the later Ricardo Rojas, who resorts to circum-
stantial information to create a rational stage on which to show the veracity
 17  BOLÍVAR IN THE RÍO DE LA PLATA  465

of the Guayaquil letter and to defend the national tradition as he imagined

it. In contrast, questioning the capacity of the archive to reveal authorial
intention through Zimmerman’s remarks about the insufficiency of words,
Borges constructs a story that is about, on the one hand, the social obsta-
cles, whether real or imagined, and intellectual prejudices confronting cul-
tural insiders, and on the other, the incentives or “freedom” enjoyed by
those on the outside to query the texts that serve as the foundation of
national traditions.

Notes
1. Tulio Halperín Donghi, “La imagen argentina de Bolívar, de Funes a
Mitre,” in El espejo de la historia: problemas argentinos y perspectivas latino-
americanas (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1998).
2. Ibid., 127–128.
3. Ibid., 121.
4. Idem.
5. See Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-­
Century Europe (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1973), 176. “Like Ranke, Michelet was a historian of the Restoration,
though he experiences that period of history in which he wrote in a way
precisely opposed to Ranke’s experience of it. What Michelet suffered as a
fall away from the ideal, a postcoital depression, as it were, Ranke enjoyed
as a consummation, but a consummation in the literal sense of the term. It
was not, as in Michelet’s conception of the revolutionary moment, a point
at which unity was achieved by the elimination of the barriers which had
been artificially erected to prohibit the people’s union with itself, but was
rather a genuine integration of elements formerly at odds with themselves
and with one another within a higher form of community, the nation-state
and the international system in which each nation-state had its place and
functioned as necessary part of the whole.”
6. Bartolomé Mitre, Historia de San Martín y de la emancipación sudameri-
cana, Tomo I (Buenos Aires: Editorial Universitaria de Bueno Aires, 1968),
35–38.
7. Ibid., 80.
8. Ibid., 36–37.
9. John Lynch, San Martín: Argentine Soldier, American Hero (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2009), 48.
10. Bartolomé Mitre, Historia de San Martín y de la emancipación sudameri-
cana, Tomo III (Buenos Aires: Editorial Universitaria de Bueno Aires,
1968), 371.
466  R. T. CONN

11. Ibid., 296.

12. Ibid., 310.
13. Ibid., 264–267. See in particular “The question was resolved de facto by
force but historical-legal documents support de jure the perspective of the
Gran Colombia, a vision that finally prevailed and became theoretically
and practically an international rule among the Hispanic American repub-
lics.” “La fuerza la resolvió de hecho; pero los documentos historicole-
gales dan a Colombia la razón de derecho, que al fin ha prevalecido
teorica y practicamente como regla internacional entre las republicas his-
panoamericanas.” 266.
14. Romualdo de la Fuente, Biografía del ilustre general americano don José de
San Martín, resumida de documentos auténticos (Paris: Rosa y Bouret, 1868).
15. José Enrique Rodó, “Bolívar” in Ariel, Liberalismo y Jacobinismo, Ensayos,
Ed. Raimundo Lazo (México: Editorial Porrúa, S.A., 1991), 173–197.
The essay appeared in 1913 as a prologue to an edition of Bolívar letters
prepared by Blanco Fombona in Paris [Cartas de Bolívar, 1799 á 1822,
Prol. José Enrique Rodó, Ed. R. Blanco Fombona (Paris: Sociedad de edi-
ciones Louis-Michaud)]; and in the same year in El mirador de Próspero,
1913 José María Serrano, Ed. (Montevideo: Imp. y Litografía Oriental).
16. Ibid., 182. “En los extensos llanos del Apure, el Libertador convive y con-
milita con aquella soldadesca primitiva y genial, que luego ha de darle sol-
dados que le sigan en la travesía de los Andes y formen la vanguardia que
vencerá en Carabobo.” “In the extensive plains of the Apure, the Liberator
lives and fights with that primitive and brilliant army rabble which will then
give him soldiers who will follow him in his crossing of the Andes and will
form the vanguard troops that will vanquish at Carabobo.”
17. Ibid., 182.
18. Rodó, 1991, “Bolívar.”
19. Ricardo Rojas, La argentinidad (Buenos Aires: La Florida, 1916), 368.
20. Ricardo Rojas, La Guerra de las naciones (Buenos Aires: Librería “La
Facultad,” 1924), 82: “Pero creo, en cambio, que hemos sufrido ya en
nuestro prestigio nacional; y cuando los argentinos, orgullosos de nuestra
gesta originaria, salgamos a decir como otras veces: ‘Nosotros condujimos
en 1810, la epopeya de la libertad americana.’ Una voz nos responderá; ‘Sí,
pero en 1917, nada hicisteis por la libertad humana. Entre el kaiser
­sangriento y la humanidad deseosa de ser libre; entre el imperio agressor y
vuestra bandera hundida en el océano, optásteis por la neutralidad.’”
“But I believe, in contrast, that we have already seen our national prestige
suffer; and when the Argentines, proud of their originary heroic deeds,
come out and say as we have at other times: ‘We led in 1810 the epic battles
that was American Liberty.’ A voice will respond to us: ‘Yes, but in 1917,
you did nothing for human liberty. Between the blood-thirsty Kaiser and
 17  BOLÍVAR IN THE RÍO DE LA PLATA  467

humanity desirous of being free; between the aggressive empire and your
banner plunged in the ocean, you chose neutrality.’” (Translation mine)
21. See page 281 in La Guerra de las naciones, where Rojas writes: “La con-
cencia de los Estados Unidos se funda en la Biblia. Hay allí la pasta de los
pueblos mesiánicos. Emerson, Whitman y Wilson hablan como los antig-
uos profetas. Nuestro pueblos carecen de un ‘libro’, lo cual quiere decir de
un ideal. Debemos los argentinos crear ese ideal, bajo la inspiración de
aquel magnífico ejemplo.”
“The conscience of the United States is founded on the Bible. Here is
the meat of the messianic peoples. Emerson, Whitman and Wilson speak
like ancient prophets. Our peoples are lacking a ‘book,’ which means an
ideal. We Argentines should create that ideal, under the inspiration of that
magnificent example.” (Translation mine)
22. See Earl T. Glauert, Ricardo Rojas and the Emergence of Argentine Cultural
Nationalism (The Hispanic American Historical Review, Feb., 1963, Vol.
43, No. 1), 1–13.
23. Ricardo Rojas, San Martín, knight of the Andes, Trans. Herschel Brickell
and Carlos Videla (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran and company,
Inc., 1945). We will be citing from this edition.
24. Ricardo Rojas, El santo de la espada: vida de San Martín (Buenos Aires:
Editorial Universitaria de Buenos Aires), 156. “Se ha dicho con justicia
que él americanizó la revolución argentina, y sería igualmente cierto que su
patriotismo fue americano. …La visión americana de Bolívar fue además de
tipo imperialista, mientras la realización sanmartiana respetó la modalidad
autonómica de cada pueblo.”
25. Ricardo Rojas, El santo de la espada: vida de San Martín, 243.
26. Ibid., 288.
27. Ibid., 232–233.
28. Ricardo Rojas. La entrevista de Guayaquil (Buenos Aires: Edit. Losada,
1947), 286. “Con este libro en la mano, respaldado por sus citas docu-
mentales, yo afirmo una vez más que San Martín no fue monarquista. Por
eso fué revolucionario; un republicano que quería conciliar la autoridad y
la libertad, mediante la ley. Deseaba que el regimen de la América indepen-
diente se asentara en la conciencia cívica de los ciudadanos, de lo cual,
según él, carecían las colonias hispanoamericanas. Detestó las muchedum-
bres ignorantes, las soldadescas desmandadas, las oligarquías sensuales,
pasto de politicos aventureros. En dos palabras: un militar que no quiso ser
caudillo, un estadista que no quiso ser demagogo.”
29. Ricardo Rojas. La entrevista de Guayaquil (Buenos Aires: Edit. Losada,
1947).
30. Lafond de Lurcy, Gabriel, Voyages Autour Du Monde Et Naufrages Célèbres
(Paris: Administration de librarie, 1844).
468  R. T. CONN

31. Jorge Luis Borges, El informe de Brodie, Ed. B.  Suárez Lynch (Buenos
Aires: Emecé Editores, 1970).
32. For a reading of the story that underlines the ways in which Borges plays
with referentiality and silence and that also speaks of the character’s Jewish
identity and of Schopenhauer, see Daniel Balderston, “Behind Closed
Doors: The Guayaquil Meeting and the Silences of History” in Out of
Context: Historical Reference and the Representation of Reality (Durham:
Duke University Press, 1993), 115–131.
33. Arthur Schopenhauer, The wisdom of life and other essays by Arthur
Schopenhauer. Trans. Bailey Saunders and Ernest Belfort Bax (Washington,
DC: M.W. Dunne, 1901), 47.
 CHAPTER 18

Epilogue

If the story of the circulation of Bolívar’s figure turns on processes involv-

ing the formation of national, hemispheric, and academic traditions, the
three spaces of engagement sometimes coinciding with one another and
other times diverging, the idea that we can step outside all this is fraught
with challenges. In fact, even when we claim otherwise, we cannot help
but, in some manner, participate in them. All of which is not to cast doubt
on the expertise that has been displayed over the decades on Bolívar and
his contexts, but rather to emphasize the complexity that defines the
thinking and writing of his figure on the geopolitical stage of the Americas.
That complexity is, perhaps, easier to recognize in the cases of those inter-
preters who openly address previous or contemporary interpretations of
his figure in their bid to make their vision prevail than it is in that of the
vast majority who do not, claiming, to the contrary, that their version
constitutes a restoration of Bolívar to his original contexts or to the con-
texts that, in fact, matter and in whose light we can see him accurately. Yet
to follow the path back to any proposed context without understanding
the conditions of production of his figure obscures as much as it clarifies,
as there is no one place to return to, no rock bottom from which we can
narrate, only shifting terrain. To compare, for instance, the places to which
the likes of Indalecio Liévano Aguirre (Colombian), José Luis Salcedo-­
Bastardo (Venezuelan), and David Bushnell (US American) take their
readers is to find oneself having to drop anchor at multiple ports.

© The Author(s) 2020 469

R. T. Conn, Bolívar’s Afterlife in the Americas,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26218-1_18
470  R. T. CONN

We have already spoken of the Colombian historian Indalecio Liévano

Aguirre in Chap. 11. In particular, we saw how Liévano Aguirre uses the
leader’s family’s Basque history to re-define Bolívar’s ethnic and political
origins for his readers. The new genealogy he proposes goes directly back
to Spain while sidestepping Bolívar’s family’s racial and social identity as
defined in Venezuela. It is one that the historian/diplomat adopts to con-
struct a figure representative of social classes in Colombia and that is
intended to be in-line with the Liberal populist subject position of the
recently assassinated Gaitán. We have yet, though, to speak fully of
Salcedo-Bastardo, who occupies an important place among Venezuela’s
many Bolívar interpreters, as Carrera Damas underlines in his 1969 Culto
a Bolívar (Cult of Bolívar).
Notable for our purposes is one work in particular, José Luis Salcedo-­
Bastardo’s Bolívar: un continente y un destino (Bolívar: a Continent and a
Destiny), published in 1972 at the Organization of American States in
Washington, D.C. Salcedo-Bastardo submitted it to the OAS in a compe-
tition for best book on Bolívar, with 36 works from 14 different countries
among the entries. He won. The purpose of the competition was to select
and showcase a history that put a liberal spin on the ideological regional
and world struggle of the Cold War in such a manner as to legitimize OAS
and US support of the Right. Chile was the immediate concern. In 1970,
the country elected the socialist Salvador Allende president. That followed
what was the most momentous moment of the Left in twentieth century
Latin America, the 1959 Cuban Revolution. The United States, which
would help engineer a coup against Allende in 1973, already had a long
history of training Latin American military leaders and of creating and/or
supporting authoritarian and military governments: the Guatemalan
(1954–); the Brazilian (1964–1985); and the Bolivian under Hugo Bánzer
(1971–78). Later would come the Uruguayan, (1973–1985); the Chilean,
(1973–1989); and the Argentine, (1976–1983).
As part of the Cold War politics, in 1966, two years after the Brazilian
military seized power from the country’s elected government to turn
back agrarian reform and other social measures, four years after the
Cuban Missile Crisis, and five years after the Bay of Pigs, the OAS had
erected at its entrance a statue it received from the Spain of Francisco
Franco, one of Isabel I, the figure whose marriage to Ferdinand II of
Aragon in 1469 became the foundation for the political unification of
Spain. The words etched on the statue’s pedestal read: “Isabel I, la
católica, reina de Castilla y Aragón, y de las islas y tierra firme del océano
 18 EPILOGUE  471

mar.” (Isabel 1, the Catholic, Queen of Castille and Aragón, and of the
islands and mainland of the Ocean Sea.)1
Invoking the Spanish empire with its vast colonies in the Americas
reconstituted through Isabel I—a variation on the concept of unity that
served as a foundation for Franco’s fascist Spain—the statue offered a
vision of the Americas that was strangely pristine and nostalgic but that
could not have been more political, a symbol marking anything in the
Latin America of the moment that stood outside what was Catholic- and
Spanish-descended as ideological, and therefore disposable. But now the
OAS, with its jury of scholars from different countries of the Americas,
including an historian from the United States who had earlier critiqued
Salcedo-Bastardo, was taking advantage of the wide and deep interest in
Bolívar built up over previous decades across the Americas with Venezuela
and the United States the major centers of that interest to take advantage
once again of his figure.
The scholar who evidently performed that ideological labor for the
organization most efficiently, Salcedo-Bastardo represents Bolívar as one
who cared deeply about the plight of workers, but also as one who stood
for capitalism, responsible administration, and the institutions of liberal
society. Salcedo-Bastardo also speaks about the OAS.  Ever sensitive to
the politics of Washington D.C. and Latin America, in the final pages of
his work he purports to lift the OAS out from under the pall of the Pan
American Union, explaining to suspect Latin American audiences that
the OAS is in fact independent of the United States because it exists
under the United Nations’s Charter.2
In Salcedo-Bastardo’s version of Bolívar that neatly avoids reference to
Cuba, Brazil, or Salvador Allende, suppressing from view the conditions of
its production, and which in the 1977 English-language edition highlights
even more the differences between the OAS and the Pan American Union
than it does in that of 1972 with a new final chapter titled “Present and
Future,”3 he was strategic, hitting several locations in the Bolívar epic to
prop up his figure in the way he wanted to and to defend the Gran
Colombia as a liberal utopia. Land redistribution is one element Salcedo-­
Bastardo uses to his advantage.
For decades, Salcedo-Bastardo had been making much of Bolívar’s land
redistribution act to compensate the soldiers and officials of his army, see-
ing in it a form of socialism without being socialism. In his 1972 book, he
continued that critical line, presenting Bolívar as a champion of land
reform and railing against the generals under him who seized the estates
472  R. T. CONN

once belonging to the old elites without allowing their properties to be

properly parceled and distributed. He names all of them, including Páez
and the Monagas brothers, caudillos, as he calls them, who undo Bolívar’s
social revolution. Slavery is a second issue he considers in his attempt to
position Bolívar as a force of his social liberalism. Páez is once again a foil.
In contrast to Bolívar who champions abolition and puts in place a voucher
system for slave owners to be compensated for their lost “property,” we
are told that Páez, with the 1830 constitution, allows for the return of
legalized slavery. The 1859–1863 Federal War is still another discursive
space before which Salcedo-Bastardo positions himself.
Speaking of the war, Salcedo-Bastardo tells not of a revolution out of
control, as Gil Fortoul does, but of former slaves who have been given
their freedom only to return to work at the same plantations to which they
had been subjugated, in some cases under more brutal conditions. As for
the ideological program of the federalists, he reduces it to an attempt to
return to the regional framework that had prevailed in colonial times, cen-
tralism simply being the destiny of Venezuela and Bolívar standing for
centralism against federalism. Imperialism is still another question he
addresses, using this historical reality commonly called upon by actors on
the Left to authorize their political positions for the purpose of shoring up
the author’s anti-Castro, anti-Allende vision. Salcedo-Bastardo’s Latin
America, which he aggressively labels as democratic, code for anti-com-
munist, has suffered at the hands of different imperial powers, first Spain,
then the United States (with the Mexican-American war of 1846–1848
and the Pan Americanism movement of 1889 to the 1950s), and France
(with the Second Empire’s occupation of Mexico from 1862 to 1867).
Finally, he takes a position on the final dictatorship, explaining that because
the Gran Colombia was crumbling, Bolívar had no choice but to take
power in the manner he did. As for the Admirable Congress, he cites a
letter in which Bolívar states that his intention was always to call the con-
gress so as to ensure that the people have a voice.4 The conclusion: Bolívar
is not himself dictatorial or desirous of finding ways to remain in power.
How Salcedo-Bastardo presents his relationship to Latin American
intellectuals is of particular importance. Eliding entirely ideological differ-
ence, he brings together figures from across the political spectrum, from
José Martí to Rufino Blanco Fombona and from José Enrique Rodó to
Pablo Neruda and Indalecio Liévano Aguirre, as well as actors from out-
side of Latin America, particularly historians in the United States, Canada,
and Europe. In each case, he re-defines the content of their cultural work.
 18 EPILOGUE  473

We see him do this “with the words of the most important poet of the
times in the world—Pablo Neruda,” citing an entire stanza from Neruda’s
poem of 1941, “An Ode to Bolívar,” discussed in Chap. 1.5 Delinking
those words from their ideological referent, he represents Neruda, winner
of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1971, as a spokesperson for liberty, say-
ing nothing of how Neruda in this poem entwines Bolívar with Latin
America’s natural resources and the Spanish Civil War; of the Neruda who
subsequently, in the 1940s, becomes a member of the communist party, a
Chilean senator representing saltpeter workers in the Atacama Desert, and
a powerful defender through his poetry of the Latin American Left; of the
Neruda in the 1950s and 1960s who is a critic of figures like the Venezuelan
Rómulo Betancourt whom he accuses of selling out to the United States;
or of the figure who from the late 1960s through his death on September
23, 1973, is a key supporter of Salvador Allende, having directed the
Communist Party in Chile to join forces with the socialist to promote
Allende in the 1970 elections. To be sure, Salcedo-Bastardo is making the
most well-known Latin American poet of the moment his own, portraying
him as a voice for his socially conscious liberalism, not communism.
We see him do something similar with the exiled Spanish writer and
diplomat, Salvador de Madariaga of whom we spoke in Chaps. 7 and 16
and who we recall was declared a calumniator by Venezuela’s Bolivarian
Society. Using Madariaga’s racist hermeneutic to his advantage, he asserts
that Bolívar biologically and geographically represents three races: Indian,
black, and white.6 But Madariaga elaborates this racial vision to present
Bolívar not as a force for republicanism or democracy but as one who was
driven only by his own will to power. All this is finessed by Salcedo-Bastardo,
who is going to Madariaga, together with Bolívar’s other interpreters—
really, the entire tradition of reflection on his figure, from Sarmiento to
Martí to Sherwell and others—for his own ends. That is to have Bolívar
contain and resolve through his body, acts, and ideas, as well as the dispa-
rate figures who have represented him, issues that have provided a ground-
ing for the Left. Salcedo-Bastardo’s Bolívar stands for change through
liberal reforms, education, and collective action, serving as a far more mod-
ern instrument for containing and attacking the Left than the Isabel I statue.
As for the US American historian of Bolívar, David Bushnell, of whom
we have spoken several times, and who is the third person we name in the
opening paragraph, after Liévano Aguirre and Salcedo-Bastando, it is
interesting to note that Bushnell started off as a scholar of Francisco de
Paula Santander before becoming a scholar of Bolívar as well, producing
474  R. T. CONN

in 1954 The Santander Regime in Gran Colombia, a book that provides a

penetrating archival account of Santander’s record as acting president of
the Gran Colombia during the decade of the 1820s. With this work,
Bushnell, it could be said, sought to defeat one of the most important
binaries governing transmitted knowledge about Bolívar in the United
States, Venezuela, and elsewhere: that pitting his figure against a Santander
who is legalistic, money-hungry, free-spending, and treacherous, the
alleged force behind the September 25, 1828, attempt on Bolívar’s life,
and to be sure, the most common straw man against whom Bolívar has
been held up as virtuous and visionary. Bushnell chisels out a different
figure—a successful and capable leader who as chief executive of the Gran
Colombia when Bolívar was in the south defended what he saw as the
nation’s interests, a leader, furthermore, whose involvement in the assas-
sination attempt after Bolívar’s return to Bogotá was anything but certain.
Why the negative view of Santander in the first place? Bushnell asserts that
the Venezuelan elites of the 1820s were concerned about their geographic
marginalization from Bogotá, the capital of the Gran Colombia, and for
this reason were disposed to casting aspersions on the central government,
as when they accused Santander of squandering the British loan of 1824.
In other scholarly work, in a similar effort to rid the historical record of
the myth and caricature that in his mind has marred it, Bushnell illumi-
nates the context of several of Bolívar’s often quoted statements, in par-
ticular, the one he made against the United States in the late 1820s. As he
argues, the statement in question, repeated frequently by those who would
present Bolívar as an inveterate critic of the United States, was made in the
context of Bolívar’s concern that the power to the north was attempting
to stop the Gran Colombia from establishing a relationship with Britain,
then its commercial rival. Here, as he would see it, was a verbal act respond-
ing to a particular moment elevated over time to represent the essential
Bolívar, eclipsing his statements of admiration for US federalism in which
he stipulated that such a model was appropriate for the United States but
not for Latin America.7
Yet, as Bushnell would affirm, the multiple formulations of Bolívar’s
figure that have been constructed over time, certain ones of which he has
studied, tell an important story about hemispheric politics and nation
construction. As an interpreter in his own right of Bolívar on that stage
and of many of the figures associated with him, Bushnell is, of course, a
part of it. Indeed, how he came to Santander and to Bolívar is interesting
to speculate on, for one can think that it was the Santander revival in
 18 EPILOGUE  475

Colombia of the 1930s and 1940s that inspired the US American Harvard
Ph.D. candidate, motivating him to offer the world an account of the
Gran Colombia different from the Bolívar-centered versions that became
common during the US-led Pan American period, 1890–1959. As we saw
in Chaps. 9, 10, and 11, between World War I and the 1950s, a remark-
able number of Venezuelan-slanted historical, biographical, and fictional
accounts of Bolívar were produced, including Guillermo Sherwell’s 1921
biography of Bolívar, Gerhard Masur’s masterpiece of 1948, and Waldo
Frank’s Bolívar of 1951, the last one which celebrated Venezuelan intel-
lectuals, while denigrating their Colombian counterparts. In this context,
a US scholar’s decision in the late 1940s and 1950s to write a book about
the Santander administration of the 1820s with an eye to clarifying the
Bolívar-Santander binary and supporting Colombian historiography
becomes rich with meaning.
Distinguishing between truth and error has been of less significance
for this study, then, than inquiring into how the figure of Bolívar together
with the leaders with whom he was associated have been brought forth
in individual national traditions. Many questions have been asked. What
aspects of Bolívar’s acts, decisions, and writings have become “discur-
sive,” acquiring significance in one country but not in another, or at least
existing there differently? Understanding, for instance, the importance of
General Córdoba’s insurrection for Colombians, of Bolívar’s Liberation
Army’s crossing of the Desaguadero for Bolivians, of Bolívar’s Panama
Congress for US Americans and their Pan American brethren, of the
First Republic for some Venezuelans determined to overcome the legacy
of Bolívar’s own words denouncing the civil process in military times,
and of the Guayaquil meeting for Argentines is a first and absolutely
necessary step in creating the conditions to see that there are different
traditions, and that we can engage those traditions both on their own
terms and in relation to others. But we have also inquired into what his-
torical factors and ideological issues have driven interest in Bolívar and
conditioned the interpretation of his figure. Stating that Venezuelans
perceive him differently than do Colombians is important, for instance,
but hardly sufficient. They arrive at their understanding of Bolívar by
way of a different or uniquely configured set of historical figures, texts,
and polemics.
In the Venezuelan tradition, to be sure, the First Republic has a unique
meaning, existing as a foundational moment to be celebrated, denied, or
otherwise reconstructed in the creation of the state. In contrast, in the
476  R. T. CONN

Colombian one can speak of only two periods of republics, the sequence
of a First, Second, and Third Republic used in Venezuela not applying: the
city-states that were in force between 1810 and 1816 in New Granada and
that vied with one another for leadership over the independence process (a
moment traditionally referred to as the patria boba, with the designation
having been contested during the past few decades for being derogatory)
and the Gran Colombia with its beginnings in 1819, subsequent to
Bolívar’s armies’ victories in Boyacá and Bogotá in 1819. Bolívar, who
served the city-state of Cartagena, just as he did that of the Tunja in the
early years, would come down in the Colombian tradition filtered through
his relationship to Francisco de Paula Santander. Simply put, as has been
argued throughout this book, when it comes to narrating Bolívar’s story
and, more generally, that of independence, nation matters.
To illustrate this point with an extended example, let us consider the
case of the 1858 encyclopedia entry written by Karl Marx about Bolívar,
a text that has received sporadic attention over the years in different
interpretive spaces, including those of the Mexican, Argentine, and US
academies, as well as the Spain of the Civil War at the hands of the Soviets,
as we saw in Chap. 1. It also entered public discourse in Venezuela during
the Chávez years. Marx wrote the entry for the third volume of Charles
Dana’s New American Cyclopedia, basing it in large part on the 1831
British edition of Ducoudray-Holstein’s history and refusing to make any
changes to it when queried by the editor. In the entry, Marx portrays
Bolívar as a scion of the Caracas aristocracy who was favored throughout
his military career by circumstance, bringing to the attention of the
reader the important acts of three lesser known individuals without whose
assistance he alleges the leader would have either died in battle or failed
to acquire needed funding—his uncle, José Félix Ribas; the Dutchman,
Luis Brión, who secured him ships and soldiers; and Juan Germán Roscío,
a Venezuelan financier. Curiously, Marx leaves out, the president of Haiti,
Pétion. The image that emerges is that of a hapless, entirely unworthy
figure who retreats in moments of peril and who takes credit for the
deeds of others, a figure whose heroism has been invented, the real story
of his life being that of his numerous acts of cowardice as well as his
extraordinary will to power. Why Marx would choose to write an entry
on Bolívar on the basis of this source and only one other has been the
subject of much speculation, especially when, as Hal Draper has shown,
Marx chose to write the entry himself rather than have it written by
Engels, who composed the majority of the encyclopedia entries that
 18 EPILOGUE  477

appear under his name.8 For some, Marx wanted to defeat or problema-
tize the great-­man theory by providing a lesson on the perils of biography
and ­historiography, as evident, as he would have it, in the entries of other
national encyclopedias from the time that offered entirely positive views
of the Liberator. For others, his critics, Marx displays in this short piece
as well as in other writings on Latin America a Hegelian perspective that
prevented him from seeing the new republics as anything but ahistorical
societies repeating European stories, with Bolívar representing a figure
with Bonapartist ambitions.
That Marx’s encyclopedia entry would surface again in Chávez’s
Venezuela is hardly surprising, though it should be noted that in the cre-
ation and defense of Latin America’s Left tradition, the entry has rarely
been referred to, much less focused on, by those interested in contesting
the Left’s long-standing claims on Bolívar. General economic, social, and
historical principles have been debated in relation to major works by Marx,
and of course, the Left has been violently persecuted, most notoriously
between the 1960s and the 1980s, with the Communist Party being
declared illegal and its members and affiliates targeted, imprisoned, and
killed by the state, but there has been no occasion for individual national
debate about Marxist interpretations of Bolívar, never mind one about
Marx’s own remarks about the personage with whom he would one day
be linked not negatively but positively in Latin America. Witness that
absence in critical discussion of what was the longest-standing Marxist
group in Latin America, the FARC in Colombia, which laid claim to
Bolívar’s military legacy and used as its symbol a sword that purportedly
once belonged to him, or in critical discussion of the Cuban Revolution,
which places Bolívar next to Che. But in a nation that, historically, has
seen itself as custodian of Bolívar’s legacy and in which a person regarded
as an “interloper” succeeded in obtaining political power in great part
through the local prestige of that legacy, how could a massive debate
about Bolívar’s relationship to Marx not have occurred and how, then,
could the encyclopedia entry not have resurfaced? A gift for the Center
and for the Right, it only had to be posted on the Internet or quoted from
to reinforce the case against Chávez, namely that his political persona was
a contradiction. How could this leader who crafted his political script so
carefully using Bolívar’s words and acts speak of a Marxist Bolívar if Marx
himself had no respect for this liberal, denouncing him as an impostor
while also labeling him among other things dictator?
478  R. T. CONN

It was not only Chávez’s critics who addressed the coherence of his
symbolic language; some of his supporters did as well. The fact was that
Chávez, in performing Bolívar on the Venezuelan national stage, in
­purporting to embody in important aspects of his project the Bolivarian
spirit, was at risk, particularly, at the beginning of his presidency, of becom-
ing opaque to the public, his symbols reducible to totems, meaningful to
him and other Venezuelans but to no one else, of becoming, therefore, all
the more vulnerable to attack if not because of the revolution of which he
spoke and which was the target of a US-backed coup, then because of such
theatrical antics as that of appearing seated in public with a place next to
him reserved for Bolívar. Responding to this new form of political theater,
the Mexican intellectual Heinz Dieterich, who came to Chávez’s defense
early in his tenure, sought to mediate the leader’s ideological position
beyond Venezuela’s debate about biographical and textual fidelity to the
Liberator.
Dieterich’s objective was to render Chávez comprehensible to an inter-
national audience, to translate him, so to speak, by placing him in dia-
logue with established Latin American discursive practices, and more
specifically as regarded the Left, with Fidel Castro. On the one hand, he
explains to the public that Chávez was drawing upon unrelated tendencies
or ideologies in accordance with Latin America’s history of mestizaje or
racial mixing, an important discursive paradigm, as we have seen several
times in this book, established in Mexico in the 1920s by José Vasconcelos
that quickly became dominant, inspiring writers and intellectuals across
Latin America to use a new concept of race to position themselves in the
globalizing world, and more specifically, to consider hybridity in and of
itself as a positive category. On the other hand, as if seeking to relegate to
the backstage the idea of Chávez as a latter-day Bolívar, he first identifies
Chávez with Castro, asserting that the “commander” reasoned like the
great thinker that the Cuban leader purportedly was, then places him
within Latin America’s populist tradition. To locate him squarely within
that tradition, Dieterich identifies several elements to demonstrate among
other things that he was not only a voice of the masses but that he himself
was of the masses. Chávez is celebrated as a person of humble birth who
was able to use his charisma to connect with the people, among whom he
could mix without fear of being assassinated unlike leaders from the elites,
the likelihood of assassination constructed as a rather aggressive litmus
test of who a good populist is. His manner of reasoning as opposed to the
content of his thought, his physical and oratorical posture before the pub-
 18 EPILOGUE  479

lic, his charisma, to be sure, his honesty, and finally his humor, which
transformed his audience from one consisting of individuals into one
defined by community, are all emphasized:

The Commander reasons in a sequential and didactic manner like the great
thinker Fidel Castro; he comes from the people and has kept close to it,
using his charisma to maintain that essential connection for the sake of
change; he possesses humility in his dealings with the masses, he loses him-
self among them without fear of assassination, and sublimates reality by way
of what we call “humour” in acts that, for an instant, dissolve our individual-
ity into a great community of vibrant entities supportive of one another,
united among themselves.9

Dieterich portrays the then-new leader such as to connect past to pres-

ent, defining him as the new embodiment of the “Leftist” dream of
Bolívar’s patria grande, the Latin American Left having not had strong,
global voices since the times of Pablo Neruda and the Sandinistas, who fell
out of power in 1991 as a result of the US-sponsored Contra War, and
having been attacked for decades by US Cold War policies and dealt a new
blow by the neo-­liberalism of the 1990s.
If some on the Latin American Left sought to package Chávez in the
early years of his tenure, on the Right, there were efforts to do the same,
as in the case of the Venezuelan philosopher Oscar Reyes, who, voicing the
sentiment of the middle class that had voted for him in mass in the first
elections, proposes that the Marxist framework of his administration
would give way to a new liberalism. To this end, in an essay entitled “Una
explicación muy llanera de Chávez” (“A Very Plain Explanation of
Chávez”) that plays on the politically fraught word “plains,” Reyes also
explains Chávez’s relationship both to tradition and to Castro.10 In con-
trast to Dieterich, he presents the confluence of different if not incompat-
ible traditions in Chávez’s thought—Bolivarianism and Marxism among
the most important of these, to be sure—not as a reflection of the fre-
quently formulated vision of a Latin America defined by intellectual and
cultural traditions rooted in mixing and hybridity, but as an effect of the
mental operations of the Venezuelan country-person or guabino of the
plains who, as the author states with no small amount of classist and racist
vitriol, compulsively repeats what his interlocutors say to him, searching
always for agreement. On the subject of Chávez’s relationship to Castro,
Reyes, similarly, to reduce ideology to quaint and child-like localism,
480  R. T. CONN

asserts that there were no essential connections between the two, that the
oratory of Chávez, characterized by long and rambling speeches just like
that of the Cuban leader, should not be regarded as evidence that Chávez
was following Castro, but rather seen in the light of the natural loquacity
of the ­character of the guabino that he imagined. Ultimately it is the pur-
ported impressionability of this caricature of Venezuelan rural people that
is of greatest interest as a category of analysis to the extremely patronizing
Reyes whose formulations reflect the paradigms of white privilege put in
place by the elites who succeeded the Gómez era. Comparing his guabino
Chávez to Woody Allen’s Zelig, the human sponge or chameleon character
created by the US American director in the 1980s, Reyes presents Chávez
as a leader incapable of thinking for himself, and what’s more, in accor-
dance with that metaphor, as a natural impersonator. Like others at the
time who wanted to believe that Chávez was nothing but a puppet of more
radical advisors whose values he had adopted, Reyes was offering hope to
the liberal Center and the Right, namely that this “boy from the country”
could end up on the other side of the political spectrum if surrounded by
the right people. It was the dream of a political and cultural elite that, as
Judith Ewell would say, hearkened back to the days of Páez and Gómez,
leaders who surrounded themselves with established intellectuals.

Bolívar: Gateway to the International Academy

Finally, outside of Latin America during the decades subsequent to those
of Pan Americanism (1889–1950s), interest in Bolívar’s figure has been
alive and well, serving as a foundation for economic, social, and race theo-
ries in academic debates, as we saw in Chaps. 1 and 2, with the differences
in the interpretation of his figure a reflection of the critical and ideological
work performed. One important example is that of British political theo-
rist Anthony Pagden who in the midst of the neo-­liberalism rage of the
early 1990s brought out in 1995 Lords of All the World, Ideologies of Empire
in Spain, France, and Britain c. 1500 to c.1800. Here Pagden finds in
Bolívar a malleable figure for the world history he produces, activating the
Bolívar-Washington dyad of which we have spoken previously. Using this
dyad to define the history of the Americas through the action or nonac-
tion of its “great figures,” Pagden faults Bolívar for failing to live up to the
standard set by Washington by refusing to disband his army until it dis-
banded on its own at the time of his expulsion from Bogotá.
The primary criticism that Pagden launches, however, is in regard to
Bolívar’s view of markets, as he rips into him for not embracing the mod-
ern concept of commerce whose history he traces in his 1995 book, with
 18 EPILOGUE  481

Bolívar rejecting said paradigm in favor of a vision of the state based on the
program of education and morality, as seen in his Angostura Address.
Pagden calls upon comparisons of old, though not exactly in the terms
used by US-based hemispheric thinkers of the nineteenth century and by
Pan American thinkers of the twentieth century, for whom culture was the
defining difference, the Anglo-American cultural tradition placed in con-
trast to the Spanish-Latin American. Departing from these categories,
Pagden sees Bolívar plainly and simply as embodying old-regime notions
of nation and expansion, defending this assertion from the perspective of
the classicist paradigm he adopts to produce his history. Speaking from the
heights of Greece and Rome, he offers the following genealogy: the
English Colonies, under the influence of Washington, fashioned their
union on the multistate model of Athens; the Spanish colonies, as evident
from the short-lived Gran Colombia of Bolívar, fashioned theirs on the
centralist principles of Rome. Whereas the one, furthermore, succeeded in
generating the desired federation, this thanks to Washington, the other
did not, the reason being that Bolívar failed to imagine, and detail in writ-
ing, a federated union based on commerce, a fact, Pagden insists, that
proved fatal for a continent that would be unsuccessful economically.11
Never mind the economic interests of local elites in La Paz, Caracas, Lima,
and Bogotá, the market forces of the moment, or, furthermore, that
Bolívar’s Gran Colombia and his proposed Andean Federation were
rejected by his contemporaries, Pagden, in his attempt at promoting eco-
nomic development in Latin America, is interested in the more dramatic
possibility of a Bolívar responsible for an entire continent, a figure who
prepared Latin America for a modernity contaminated by Europe’s old
regime, having failed to heed the lessons of the classical past.
For her part, Mary Louise Pratt, a US-based academic, similarly pres-
ents Bolívar as a foundational figure, but from within the context of the
culture wars of the United States in the 1980s and 1990s. Focusing on the
story of independence from the perspective of the entrance of new British
capitalist interests in Latin America and of the subject positions of work-
ers, non-whites, and women, she gives to her readers a Bolívar who, in
opposition to the conservative forces that sought to preside over these
subjects, desired to make real the liberal project. In her progressive version
of Bolívar that shares certain elements with Lynch’s 1973 iteration of his
figure, downplayed, if not removed, from view are Bolívar’s relationships
to his generals, his assumption of dictatorial powers, his vision of the
United Kingdom, and his connections to race issues, most significantly, his
fear of pardocracia. Instead, Pratt presents Bolívar as a figure who stood
482  R. T. CONN

plainly and simply for liberation, desiring to dominate Nature, not other
human beings, the evidence of this being his “My Delirium on the
Chimborazo,” an immaculate figure who was entirely of the future but
whose life and acts in the end show him the impossibility of creating a
modern Latin America.12 For Pratt, Bolívar represents a heroic beginning
or possibility that never became more than that, a victim of the elites. For
Pagden, in contrast, Bolívar’s purportedly old-regime model was in fact
fulfilled. Here are two narratives that tell different stories about Bolívar
within opposing ideological frameworks for understanding the actors
responsible for economic underdevelopment and social marginalization.
But if a lot is revealed by looking at how Bolívar’s figure is spun in
these two cases, either as an old model given new life to or as a new
model aborted, our concern—let us consider for a last time—has been to
allow the actors who have gone to him to speak, which means under-
standing their narratives as ones arrived at in particular moments in the
context of already established traditions of interpretation of Bolívar’s
figure, traditions that we have an obligation to know, as they tell us more
than whether Bolívar was a liberal or not. These depictions tell us how
historians, intellectuals, writers, and state leaders have gone about mak-
ing the arguments they have in the social and political spheres they
inhabit. This goes for all the figures we have examined in this book,
many who have remained under the radar but who precisely through
their reflections on Bolívar and their engagement with the pairings of
which we have spoken have carried out important functions at both
hemispheric and national levels.
Recovering the biographies of these actors, stories available only in the
context of the larger examination we have undertaken—what we could
call the totality of Bolívar writing and representation to which we have
aspired—has also been the aim of this study, then. We have seen the
Mexican Guillermo A. Sherwell fleeing the Mexican Revolution to become
an important actor in the Pan American Union; the Ecuadorian Juan
Montalvo turning to Bolívar to attack García Moreno, with Larrazábal’s
1865 New York City–published epistolary history providing one of the
foundations for that verbal assault; the Bolivian writer Lucío Medina tak-
ing advantage of the intersection of twentieth-century Bolivarianism in
Venezuela and state formation in Bolivia to produce volumes celebrating
his figure, this after the work of professional historians of earlier decades;
the Peruvian Víctor Andrés Belaúnde going to the United States as a non-­
Bolívar specialist, then returning to his home country with his John
Hopkins University Press volume in hand; Waldo Frank in the post-war
 18 EPILOGUE  483

period going against the wishes of Rómulo Betancourt and producing an

authoritarian Bolívar, while calling upon Bolívar’s statements from the late
1820s to produce racial hierarchies by which to promote a white-defined
Latin America, and so on.
Who has spoken most authoritatively about Bolívar is not the question
we ask. Rather, we are concerned with different locations of the Bolívar
narrative both vis-à-vis itself and the geopolitical world in which it has
been put forward. We have, to repeat once more, centered our attention
on the actors who have produced those narratives, actors who positioned
his figure on the national, hemispheric, and world geopolitical stage to
create knowledge on state formation to be consumed by educational insti-
tutions, civic and political bodies, and elites. As we have seen, they have
performed this function at home, in transit or exile, as well as in the posi-
tion of émigrés intent on finding a place for themselves in the countries to
which they have arrived.
José Martí, Pablo Neruda, and Ángel Rama can be placed in the second
category; the Mexican Sherwell, and the German Masur in the third; the
Peruvian Belaúnde in all three categories. But in ways complex and perhaps
unexpected, these actors have also participated in the construction of
already established sites and/or of new ones, their own journeys of dis-
placement and travels themselves productive of new intermediate, inter-
state subject positions. In our story, we have also seen how Venezuela and
Colombia have been connected at different levels; their historical experi-
ences often imagined against one another. A final example in the story of
that relationship concerns Indalecio Liévano Aguirre’s biography, which
has gone through multiple editions and reprintings in Colombia, Cuba,
Venezuela, and Spain. In the new Venezuelan printing of 1988 requested
by then Venezuelan president, Jaime Lusinchi, an update of that of 1971 (a
request that included a new edition of the Augusto Mijares’ Venezuelan
biography and a new Spanish-language edition of Gerhard Masur’s US
American biography) the preface writer, Mario Briceño Perozo, places the
work in opposition to that of Germán Arciniegas. Briceño Perozo asserts
that Liévano Aguirre was correct in his assessment of Bolívar while his
Colombian counterpart was wrong.13 A debate between Colombian histo-
rians is being used in the service of the Venezuelan cult. In the end, the
story of Bolívar in the Americas is as much that of the intersection of indi-
viduals, institutions, and states engaging with his figure in specific moments
and periods as it is that of an abiding interest in a major figure. It is one in
which Bolívar’s interpreters have become as important as Bolívar himself,
the question always being whose narrative are we reading.
484  R. T. CONN

Notes
1. For photo see: https://www.eszaragoza.eu/2017/06/una-reina-que-lo-
era-de-aragon-pero-no.html accessed July 2019.
2. J. L. Salcedo-Bastardo, Bolívar, un continente y un destino. (Washington,
DC: Organización de los Estados Americanos; Caracas: Academia Nacional
de la Historia, 1972), 379.
3. J.  L. Salcedo-Bastardo, 1977, Bolívar: A Continent and its Destiny, Ed.
and trans. Annella McDermott (London: Richmond Publishing Co.),
175–179.
4. J.  L. Salcedo-Bastardo, 1972, Bolívar, un continente y un destino
(Washington, DC: Organización de los Estados Americanos; Caracas:
Academia Nacional de la Historia), 108.
5. Ibid., 369. “Con las palabras del máximo poeta de esta hora mundial—
Pablo Neruda—”
6. Ibid., 48.
7. David Bushnell, The Santander Regime in Gran Colombia (Newark:
University of Delaware Press, 1954).
8. Hal Draper, “Karl Marx and Simón Bolívar: A Note on Authoritarian
Leadership in a National-Liberation Movement,” New Politics (1st series),
Vol. VII No. 1, Winter 1968: 64–67.
9. Hans Dieterich, Hugo Chávez con Bolívar y el Pueblo: Nace un nuevo
proyecto latinoamericano (Buenos Aires: Editorial 21 SRL, 1999). “Razona
el Comandante de manera secuencial y didáctica cómo el gran pensador
Fidel Castro; nació del pueblo y ha mantenido la cercanía a él, usando su
carisma para mantener ese vínculo esencial para el cambio; tiene humildad
en el trato con la gente, se pierde entre ella sin temor a un atentado y hace
sublimaciones de la realidad que llamamos “humor” y que, por un instante,
disuelven nuestra individualidad en una gran comunidad de entes solidar-
ios vibrantes, unidos entre sí.”
10. Oscar Reyes, “Una explicación muy llanera de Chávez,” Venezuela
Analítica, June 7, 2003.
11. Anthony Pagden, 1995, Lords of All the Worlds: Ideologies of Spain, Britain
and France c.1500 to c.1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press),
195–198.
12. Mary Louise Pratt, 1992, Imperial Eyes (London and New  York:
Routledge), 188. Pratt writes: “For, of course, not everyone was to be
liberated, equalized, and fraternized by the South American revolutions
any more than they were by those in France or the United States. There
were many relations of labor, property, and hierarchy that the liberators
had no intention, or hope, of decolonizing. Liberal projects like Bolívar’s
met with ferocious resistance from traditionalist elite sectors; radical proj-
 18 EPILOGUE  485

ects got nowhere. With respect to the subjugated indigenous peoples,

slaves, ­disenfranchised mestizo and colored sectors, and women of all
groups, the independence wars and their aftermath for the most part
reconfirmed white male dominance, catalyzed Eurocapitalist penetration,
and often intensified exploitation.”
13. Indalecio Liévano Aguirre, Bolívar, Prologó de Mario Briceño Perozo
(Caracas: La Presidencia de la República y la Academia Nacional de la
Historia, 1988).
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 Index1

A Allende, Salvador, 30–32, 415, 470,

ABC countries, 256 471, 473
Acción Democrática (AD, Democratic Alliance, 4, 5, 30, 38, 40, 44, 45, 58,
Action), 185, 186, 208, 221, 60, 62, 64, 67, 132, 156, 160,
290, 291 208, 249, 250, 256, 290, 307,
Acosta, Cecilio, 14, 100, 204, 205, 308, 316, 351, 353, 357, 374,
209, 212, 225n10 387, 407, 426
Adelman, Jeremy, 36–40, 42, Alto Peru, 5, 7, 27, 204, 398, 402,
52n76, 56, 58, 59, 62, 71, 403, 406, 409, 414
135, 450 Alvarez Saa, Carlos, 351
Admirable Campaign, 5, 310 American Confederation, 241, 372
Aira, César, 260 American Hispano-Europeos, 161
Alamán, Lucas, 373, 374, 376, 379, Andean Federation, 197, 284, 289,
382, 390 305, 386, 414, 451, 481
Albert Shaw Lecture in Diplomatic Andrade, Roberto, 45, 356, 357, 359,
History, 267 361, 362, 365, 367, 455
Albocracia, 26 Angell, Hildegarde, 263
Alfaro, Eloy, 361 Anglo-American, 16, 25–43, 275, 481
Alianza Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Anglo-Saxon, 288–290, 292
Nuestra América-Tratado de Angostura Address, 2, 5, 6, 11, 22, 25,
Comercio de los Pueblos 26, 36, 37, 68, 70, 72, 77, 87,
(ALBA-­TCP), 351 136–138, 161, 175, 181, 187,
Allen, Woody, 480 191, 269, 288, 335, 448, 481

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2020 503

R. T. Conn, Bolívar’s Afterlife in the Americas,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26218-1
504  INDEX
Angostura Congress, 5, 58, 61, 71,
111, 136, 156, 243, 274, 287,
288, 324, 336
Antequera, José de, 111, 113
Anti-Imperialist League, 208
Antioquia, 26
Archivo del Libertador (Archive of the
Liberator), 93, 120,
141, 171–197
See also Bolívar Archive
Arciniegas, Germán, 16, 25, 45, 187,
303–344, 439, 440
Argentina, 11, 32, 46, 48n17, 60, 63,
67, 124, 205, 213, 234, 244,
247, 251, 256, 258, 259, 262,
314, 315, 317, 321, 363, 375,
391, 403, 436, 443–446, 449,
450, 453, 455, 459, 460, 463
Argentine Confederation, 444
Arguedas, Alcides, 400–405, 407, 408
Arthur, Chester A., 230
Artigas, José Gervasio, 59, 247, 318,
319, 452, 455
Arvelo, Alberto, 9, 55
Arze, José Roberto, 415
Asamblea Deliberante (Deliberative
Assembly), 63, 65, 399
Assassin, 45, 66, 135, 229, 296, 306,
332, 333, 337, 356, 357,
362, 363
Assassination, 7, 8, 45, 66, 67, 78, 84,
208, 239, 240, 258, 305, 308,
309, 314, 320, 327, 332, 333,
335–337, 343, 349, 380, 439,
453, 474, 478, 479
Assembly, 3, 7, 27, 35, 56, 103, 104,
245, 406
Asturias, 57
Atacama Desert, 407, 426, 473
Ateneo, 375
Atlantis, 377
Audiencias, Las, 34
Austin, J.L., 218
Austria, 61, 67, 69, 234
Authoritarianism, 2, 43, 78, 124, 149,
187, 213, 221, 272, 367,
402, 454
Autonomous University of
Mexico, 393
Ávila, 111
Ayacucho, 18, 23, 31, 63, 100, 178,
182, 184
Ayacucho Library Foundation
(Fundación Biblioteca Ayacucho),
18, 19, 23, 49n23
Aymara, 414
Ayuntamientos (town halls),
33, 34, 41
Aztec, 392, 393
B
Bajo Peru, 414
Balaguer, Joaquín, 187, 188
Ballivián, José, 397, 400
Balzac, Honoré de, 425
Banda Oriental (Uruguay), 59, 247
Bank of Venezuela, 171, 172, 177
Bánzer, Hugo, 398, 409, 413,
417, 470
Baralt, Rafael María, 139
Barbarism, 69, 131, 202, 206, 233,
264, 298
Barberini, Alejandra, 344
Barreda, Gabino, 16, 372
Barrett, John, 232, 234–236, 239,
241, 249
Barrientos Ortuño, René, 412
Barrios de Chúngura, Domitila, 412,
413, 415
Batista, Fulgencio, 242
Baudelaire, Charles, 264
Bautista Alberdi, Juan, 357
Bay of Pigs, 470

Bayonne, France, 4, 77, 352
Beaux Arts, 241
Beijing, China, 250
Belaúnde, Víctor Andrés, 16, 25, 46,
264, 267–276, 288, 290, 296,
423–440, 482
Bello, Andrés, 54, 55, 71
Beltrán Ávila, Marcos, 398–400, 411
Bentham, Jeremy, 67, 136, 137,
180, 364
Berger, Marc, 230, 249
Berlin, Isaiah, 218
Betancourt, Rómulo, 78, 79, 176,
179, 185, 195, 201, 208, 211,
213, 221, 290, 291, 297, 299,
473, 483
Betancur Cuartas, Belisario, 311
Biblioteca Americana (American
Library), 19, 48n16
Bingham, Hiram, 125, 126, 132, 174,
245, 250, 263
Biography, 2, 3, 28, 30, 31, 52n76,
53, 54, 93, 108, 141, 150, 159,
189, 190, 192, 217, 246, 259,
264–266, 272, 281–283, 286,
290, 299, 314, 316, 339, 364,
387, 410, 428–430, 440, 447,
461, 475, 477, 482, 483
Birdwell, Michael E., 377
Birthday, 91, 92, 101, 114, 195, 227
Black (race), 10, 26, 41, 54, 63, 72,
87, 106, 112, 128, 141, 183,
190, 384, 473
Blaine, James G., 229–231
Blanco Fombona, Rufino, 22–25, 43,
78, 120, 155–168, 171, 174,
177, 180, 181, 192, 217, 223,
364, 365, 403, 404, 451, 472
Blanco Galindo, Carlos, 405, 418n4
Blasetti, Alessandro, 196
Bogotá, 1, 2, 6–8, 22, 57, 59, 63, 65,
67, 75n16, 84, 85, 92, 106–108,
 INDEX  505
111, 114, 135, 148, 193, 195,
219, 237, 239, 270, 283, 291,
303, 304, 306, 313–315, 325,
327, 333, 336, 337, 343, 345n9,
357, 365, 372, 395n21, 439,
474, 476, 481
Bogotazo/day of violence, 291, 298,
309, 311
Bolet Peraza, Nicanor, 89, 100,
115, 171
Bolívar Archive, 283
Bolívar (currency), 90, 214, 242,
261, 349
Bolívar Hill, 255, 262, 263
Bolívar Hotel, 263
Bolivarianism, 397, 479, 482
Bolivarian Society (Hanover
Germany), 186
Bolivarian Society of Venezuela, 12,
43, 120, 171–197, 201, 213,
224, 228, 263, 295, 351, 410,
440, 473
Bolívar Plaza, 171, 189
Bolívar Society, 310, 340, 409
Bolivia, 4–6, 8, 11, 18, 27, 29, 30, 32,
48n17, 49n29, 63–65, 68, 103,
136, 137, 149, 152n19, 177,
186, 205, 220, 240, 251, 258,
303, 304, 317, 329, 358, 359,
362, 387, 397–417, 424, 437,
438, 482
Bolshevik/Bolshevism, 268, 375,
376, 380
Bomboná, 63, 273, 349
Bon, Gustave Le, 120, 143, 436
Bonaparte, Louis-Napoleon
(Napoleon III), 131, 233, 389
Bonaparte, Napoléon, 345n10
Borges, Jorge Luis, 12,
462–465, 468n32
Bourbon, 33–35, 41, 55, 62, 82, 111,
133, 158, 161, 234, 248, 352
506  INDEX
Boutmy, Émile, 150
Boves, Tomás, 5, 57, 106, 129, 162,
166, 321
Boyacá, 5, 27, 59, 106, 182, 204,
243, 274, 324, 334, 476
Boyer, Jeanne-Pierre, 65
Brazil, 17–19, 48n17, 59, 63,
122–124, 156, 256, 327,
449, 471
Brión, Luis, 476
British America, 41
British Secret Service, 388
Brooklyn Bridge, 103, 109
Brown, Matthew, 71
Brutus, 356, 359
Bucaramanga, Diario de, 46n2, 293,
294, 304
Buenos Aires, 13, 19, 60, 165, 183,
231, 247, 248, 259, 413, 426,
444, 446, 458, 459, 484n9
Bulnes, Francisco, 150
Bushnell, David, 32, 66, 67, 111, 305,
325, 327, 328, 395n21, 438,
469, 473, 474
Byron S. Adams Press, 262
Byzantine, 401
C 304, 325, 334, 336, 476
Cable Interoceánico, de, 132
Cádiz, 35, 38, 39, 56, 60, 234, 286,
324, 447
Caesar, Julius, 202, 224n2, 356, 383
Cajigal, Juan Manuel, 57
Caldas, Francisco José de, 164
Calles, Plutarco Elías, 15, 16, 371,
378–381, 393
Cambridge University, 13, 196
Campusano, Rosa, 427–430
Canary Islands, 183
Caneca, Frei, 59
Canning, George, 62, 159, 160, 234
Carabobo, 60, 182, 204, 243, 454
Caracas, 5, 13, 14, 17, 18, 38, 40,
47n5, 48n16, 53, 56–58, 63, 77,
80, 87–92, 95n15, 99, 103, 106,
108, 111, 123, 127, 128, 138,
139, 164, 166, 167, 168n7, 171,
172, 188–190, 198n5, 203,
205–207, 212, 215, 221, 224n1,
226n35, 232, 245, 263–265,
272, 274, 290, 303, 304, 310,
324, 364, 383, 394n6, 397,
418n9, 425, 476, 481
Cárdenas, Lázaro, 14, 376, 390, 409
Caribbean, 18, 100, 101, 104, 132,
232, 234, 237, 239, 242, 249,
256, 260, 274, 313, 339, 453
Carlist, 142
Carlos IV, 33, 247, 338
Carnegie, Andrew, 232, 235
Carnegie Foundation for International
Peace, 243
Caro, Miguel Antonio, 306, 307, 313
Caro and Cuervo Institute, 313
Carranza, Venustiano, 249, 257, 393
Carrera Damas, Germán, 12, 13, 19,
30, 31, 43, 79, 94, 186,
213–216, 218, 222, 470
Carta de Jamaica, see Jamaica Letter
Cartagena, 17, 27, 56, 57, 85, 203,
Cartagena Manifesto, 5, 11, 17, 21,
22, 56, 68, 127, 139, 148, 181,
203, 211, 217, 220
Casa Natal, 171–173, 178, 179, 188,
189, 194
Casas, 131
Castañeda, Carlos, 262
Casta/racial position, 110, 117n16,
166, 188
Castilla, 293
Castillo, Antonio Cánovas del, 142
Castillo, José María del, 62
Castillo, Manuel del, 85
Castro, Fidel, 393, 439, 478–480, 484n9

Castro, Guillén de, 165
Castro Leiva, Luis, 43, 216–224,
226n35, 287
Catholic Church, 67, 91, 92, 310, 378
Catholicism, 189, 270, 297, 310, 352,
354, 376, 381, 382, 385, 428
Caudillo/military leaders, 5, 9, 10, 17,
21, 26, 28, 35, 38, 42, 49n27,
55, 57, 58, 63, 78, 79, 82, 84,
87–89, 99, 103, 111, 123, 127,
129, 132, 138, 144, 146, 147,
149–151, 153n38, 156, 157,
160, 163, 165, 167, 172, 176,
196, 202–205, 211, 215, 221,
225n10, 243, 245, 273, 286,
289, 290, 297, 298, 304, 305,
310, 317–320, 322, 327, 354,
357, 367, 371, 373, 378, 392,
393, 401, 402, 405, 411, 413,
427, 444, 447, 453, 455, 457,
459, 461, 470, 472
Caycedo, Domingo, 366
Cejador, Julio, 162
Censors, 6, 64, 73, 88, 138, 220
Centenary/centennial, 2, 15, 16, 24,
103, 138, 174, 176, 178, 179,
182, 218–219, 242, 251,
261–264, 267, 272, 308, 310,
311, 350, 359–362, 371, 372,
374, 397, 398, 405, 443, 456
Central America, 32, 41, 67, 132,
228, 232, 234, 241, 242, 249,
256, 260
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA),
240, 395n21, 411, 412, 439
Central Park Commission, 255
Central Park West, 263
Central University of Caracas, 12, 213
Central University of Venezuela,
103, 201
Centre of Latin American Studies, 13
Centro de Estudios Históricos (Center
of Historical Studies), 165
 INDEX  507
Cervantes, Miguel de, 204, 293, 294,
330, 342
Césaire, Aimé, 18
Chaco War, 409
Chamber of Deputies, 156
Charcas, 270
Charlemagne, 84
Charles V (Carlos I of Spain), 70
Chávez, Hugo, 8, 9, 12, 28, 30, 31,
78, 94, 96n30, 194, 216, 221,
299, 351, 476–480
Chiari, Rodolfo, 261
Chicago Pan American
Exposition, 229
Chicano movement, 391
Children, 87, 109, 114, 115, 166,
263, 265, 271, 295
Chile, 14, 18, 28–32, 60, 102, 201,
205, 236, 251, 256, 272, 315,
321, 363, 364, 366, 375, 388,
395n21, 407, 408, 423, 437,
446, 459, 473
Chocó, 26
Cholo class, 402
Choquehuanca, Don Domingo, 414
Chuquisaca, 27, 63, 414
Cicero, 83, 84
Cima de la Libertad (Independence
Summit), 350
Cincinnatus, 84, 103, 133
Cipriano Castro, José, 78, 83, 99,
123, 138, 155, 157, 172, 178,
221, 232, 307, 372
Ciudad Bolívar, 5, 156, 243
Civil war, 10, 12, 24, 35, 41, 68,
78–80, 83, 89, 92, 99, 112, 119,
122, 123, 132, 140, 141, 145,
155, 157, 163, 173, 189,
200n35, 204, 212–214,
232–234, 275, 298, 306, 307,
314, 323, 350, 354, 360, 361,
390, 398, 406, 444, 449, 460,
473, 476
508  INDEX
Classicism, 73, 78, 81, 82, 86, 93,
102, 125, 181, 408, 454
Classicist, 192, 407, 481
Classics, 18, 19, 25, 54, 176, 191,
329, 339, 451
Clay, Henry, 61, 243, 273, 387
Cleveland, Grover, 231
Clinton, Daniel Joseph, 271
Cobija, 412
Cold War, 18, 186–197, 237, 238,
240, 397, 411, 416, 470, 479
Colombia, 1, 56, 77, 100, 125, 161,
201, 228, 258, 284, 303, 351,
399, 450, 470
Colombian Liberation Army, 100
Colombian National Academy of
History, 311
Colombres Mármol, Eduardo,
183–185, 463
Colón, 260
Colonial Art Museum of Bogotá, 313
Columbia University, 283, 314
Columbus Memorial Library, 235, 241
Comité de Organización Política
Electoral Independiente (COPEI,
Committee for an Independent
Electoral Political Organization),
208, 221
Commercial Bureau of American
Republics, 231, 236
Commission of Sequestered
Property, 88
Communism, 179, 187, 208, 211,
240, 292, 310, 411, 439, 473
Comte, August, 120, 122, 123,
264, 307
Comunero, 111
Concert of Powers, 61, 234
Coney Island, 103, 109
Confederacy, 233, 390
Conference, 105, 210, 230, 231,
239–241, 243, 259, 262,
299, 412
Conference of American States,
229–231, 237, 239, 242, 243,
251, 259, 298, 439
Congreso Admirable, El (The
Admirable Congress), 7, 8, 55,
67, 305, 306, 366, 438, 472
Congreso de Panamá, 455
Congress, 6, 59, 62, 65, 67, 79, 80,
83, 84, 86, 95n16, 103, 119,
125, 126, 132, 146, 172, 174,
175, 186, 195, 218, 221, 258,
261, 262, 297, 304, 305, 308,
314, 321, 324, 329, 353, 373,
378, 398, 402–404, 407, 424,
425, 430, 435, 451, 472
Congress of Angostura, 6, 59
Congress of Bogotá/
Admirable, 7, 305
Congress of Cúcuta, 6, 62, 74n16,
106, 143, 266
Congress of New Granada, 245
Congress of Valencia, 175
Congress of Venezuela, 83, 245
Congress of Verona, 61, 62
Conquest, 191, 313, 331, 332, 338, 414
Conquistador, 87, 160
Constitution, 4, 56, 77, 99, 124, 158,
173, 203, 247, 286, 304, 305,
353, 372, 404, 424, 451, 472
Constitutional Congress, 84, 86, 305,
308, 324, 327
Contadora Group, 238
Contra War, 32, 479
Contreras Torres, Miguel, 381, 382
Convention, 6, 65, 243, 304, 305
Coolidge, Calvin, 250, 260, 437, 438
Coronil, Fernando, 291
Correa, Rafael, 351
Correo del Orinoco (Orinoco
Post), 58, 187
Cortes, 4, 33–38, 40, 41, 56, 60–62,
112, 142, 165, 190, 234, 246,
269, 270, 354, 374, 435

Council of Ministers, 150, 179
Crane, John, 263, 266, 286
Creole, 3, 26, 27, 34, 35, 41, 63, 70,
71, 73, 87, 88, 111–114, 126,
128, 129, 140–143, 147, 163,
166–168, 173, 182, 191, 197,
212, 215, 257, 269, 270,
279n51, 295, 330, 332, 333,
339, 388, 410, 424, 448, 449
Crespo, Joaquín, 89, 155, 172
Cret, Paul, 232
Crisóstomo Falcón, Juan, 81, 88
Cuba, 10, 11, 18, 34, 100, 101, 104,
105, 112, 113, 115, 132, 133,
157, 195, 234, 240–242, 258,
319, 362, 387, 396n24, 471
Cuban Missile Crisis, 470
Cuban Revolution, 32, 240, 318, 319,
323, 439, 470, 477
Cúcuta, 106, 304, 308, 324, 344n8
Cúcuta Congress, 22, 63, 219
Cullen, Henry, 69
Cult, 30, 31, 77, 195, 203, 214, 215,
218, 222, 223, 322
Cundinamarca, 324
Curtis, Edward E., 261
Cuyo, 154n42, 225n10, 423, 458
D Dieterich, Heinz, 478, 479, 484n9
Damas, Carrera, 12, 13, 19, 30, 31,
43, 47n5, 79, 94, 94n2, 186,
199n23, 213–216, 218,
222, 225n20
Dana, Charles, 476
Darío, Rubén, 23, 50n31, 260, 364
Daughters of the American Revolution
building, 228
Dávila, Vicente, 184, 199n20
De la Cova, Rafael, 103
De la Haya, Victor, 268
Degiovanni, Fernando, 48n19, 49n23
 INDEX  509
Deheza, José A., 405, 406, 420n26
Delmónico, 103
Democracy, 10, 24, 64, 72, 73,
131, 147, 149, 158, 161,
166, 167, 207, 291, 292, 297,
299, 308, 312, 315, 323, 325,
389, 403, 415, 416, 447,
453, 473
Descartes, René/Cartesian, 287
Díaz Ordaz, Gustavo, 392
Díaz Quiñones, Arcadio, 48n16,
48n17, 48n18, 48n19, 49n21,
112, 113, 118n21
Dictator, 7, 55, 56, 63, 64, 66, 90,
93, 103, 129, 177, 206, 243,
248, 258, 265, 267, 273, 294,
304, 314, 319, 329, 406, 411,
420n37, 425, 427, 431, 443,
453, 477
Dictatorship, 2, 7, 10, 12, 18, 22, 24,
32, 50n34, 66, 83, 84, 92, 119,
127, 131, 135, 171, 186, 188,
194, 208, 244, 246, 258, 276,
284, 285, 291, 296–298,
304–306, 312, 314, 315, 319,
326, 327, 357, 366, 372, 385,
386, 405, 409, 412–414, 437,
439, 448, 450, 452–454, 472
Dies, Martin, Jr., 380
Diez de Medina, Lucío, 409, 410,
420n34, 420n35, 421n41
Dirty War, 443
District of the South, 63, 352
Division of Humanities and Education
at the Central University of
Venezuela, 201
Dog, 164, 325, 334, 335
Dolarización, 349
Dollar diplomacy, 232, 237, 242, 260,
261, 437
Domingo Díaz, José, 82
510  INDEX
Dominican Republic, 48n17, 187,
237, 256, 261, 437
Draper, Hal, 24, 50n36, 476, 484n8
Ducoudray-Holstein, Henri Louis La
Fayette Villaume, 263, 355,
446, 476
E 178–180, 182, 186, 189, 204,
Ecuador, 5–8, 11, 33, 34, 45, 46,
48n17, 59, 63, 66, 83, 95n16,
107, 131, 143, 303, 304, 349,
387, 397, 399
Ediciones Botas, 374
Editorial-America, 23, 95n4, 158,
169n11, 174, 345n10, 403
Education, 6, 20, 21, 24, 69, 72, 73,
88, 89, 104, 115, 122, 137, 138,
145, 147, 163, 165–168, 205,
212, 235, 241, 271, 313, 318,
321, 373, 400, 436, 453, 461,
473, 481
Egeria Eisenhower Executive Office
Building, 228
Ejército Popular Revolucionario
(EPR), 343
El Cid, 165, 459
Electoral college, 64, 138, 435, 438
Elliott, John, 40–42, 56, 135, 450
Ellipse, Washington D.C., 44, 228,
232, 241
Emancipation, 29, 86, 87, 91,
112, 197
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 363,
456, 467n21
English Americas, 133
English Colonies, 481
Enlightenment, 3, 14, 20, 28, 29, 42,
50n29, 68, 69, 73, 93, 110, 112,
114, 126, 135, 140, 144, 160,
163, 165, 178, 191, 192, 201,
202, 206, 207, 216, 218–220,
222, 223, 232, 238, 247, 270,
297, 318, 329, 332, 387,
446, 450
Español-Latinoamericanos, 161
Europe, 1, 8, 21, 23, 32, 33, 42–44,
54, 55, 60–62, 64, 70, 78, 81,
82, 84, 85, 91, 105, 112, 140,
150, 155, 157, 158, 160, 173,
205, 209, 213, 220, 233, 237,
242–245, 247, 250, 255, 256,
259, 264, 269–271, 276, 276n7,
285, 286, 317, 322, 326, 329,
336, 342, 366, 372, 374, 407,
409, 424, 426, 443, 445, 454,
455, 457, 472
Ewell, Judith, 157, 168n1, 178,
273, 480
Execution, 2, 57–59, 82, 84, 90, 107,
112, 117n12, 135, 161, 164,
299, 334, 337, 366, 373,
374, 376
Exile, 1, 2, 5, 6, 8, 9, 13, 14, 16–18,
22, 23, 38, 43, 45, 71, 78–80,
89, 90, 93, 100, 104, 105, 114,
123, 155–168, 176, 185, 193,
195, 204, 208, 211, 213, 216,
221, 267, 273, 276, 288, 291,
299, 311, 314, 316, 319, 325,
352, 353, 357, 364, 374, 375,
378, 380, 391, 405, 413, 435,
436, 447, 483
F
Faggioni Vannuncci, Augusto, 350
Falguiere, Alexandre, 349
Farnham, Sally, 255, 257
Fascism, 185, 209, 240, 272, 289,
316–318, 377, 381, 393
Federalism, 21, 22, 42, 59, 139, 140,
142, 172, 175, 204, 206, 472, 474

Federal Legislative Palace of
Venezuela, 89
Federal Territory of the Amazon, 155
Federal War/Long War, 79, 88, 99,
132, 135, 143, 145, 273, 472
Federation of the Andes, 6, 7, 11, 28,
39, 42, 43, 64, 101, 109, 110,
137, 228, 263, 304, 377, 399,
438, 439
Federation of United Provinces of
Central America, 41
Felipe II, 293
Fels, Edmond de, 150
Ferdinand 1, 60
Ferdinand II of Aragon, 470
Fernando VII, 4, 33, 35, 36, 38, 40,
55, 57, 58, 60, 61, 65, 71, 77,
82, 91, 142, 164, 233, 234, 270,
337, 338, 373, 374
Ferrocarril Bolívar, El (The Bolívar
Railroad), 89
First Republic, 5, 17, 38–40, 78, 82,
128, 129, 174, 203, 204, 207,
217, 286, 288, 475
Flaubert, Gustave, 427
Flores, Juan José, 7, 8, 45, 68, 75n25,
96n30, 161, 349, 352–354,
357–362, 364–366
Flores Jijón, Antonio, 358
Flores Magón, Enrique, 379
Flores Magón, Ricardo, 379
Fondo de Cultura Económica, 19,
94n3, 225n19
Fort Bocachica, 312
France, 4, 10, 14, 21, 36, 49n27, 54,
55, 57, 60–63, 67, 73, 77, 90,
112, 124, 127, 158, 159, 206,
207, 233, 234, 264, 286, 287,
298, 352, 388–390, 404, 436,
446, 472, 484n12
Francia, José Gaspar Rodríguez de,
49n27, 248
Francisco Hall, 364
 INDEX  511
Franco, Francisco, 14, 286, 314, 354,
376, 470, 471
Francophile, 90, 206, 293, 385
Frank, Waldo, 74n16, 84, 117n13,
192, 264, 281–299, 304, 314,
316, 387, 475, 482
Freemasonry, 446, 447, 459
French-American Institute, 264
French Colonial Empire, 233
French Enlightenment, 68, 73, 160
Freud, Sigmund, 192, 294, 295, 392
Freudianism, 3, 292, 293, 295
Friendship, 13, 84, 239, 243, 324,
335, 403
Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de
Colombia (FARC), 310, 477
Fundación Biblioteca Ayacucho
(Ayacucho Library Foundation),
18, 19, 49n23, 153n25,
153n34, 153n36
G
Gabaldón Iragory, José Rafael, 177
Gabaldón Márquez, Joaquín,
177, 198n5
Gabante, 95n14, 131, 151n4, 151n11
Gaitán, Jorge Eliécer, 208, 239, 291,
298, 309, 310, 314, 321,
439, 470
Galeano, Eduardo, 30, 31, 51n57, 83
Gallegos, Rómulo, 185, 186, 208,
211, 290, 291, 298
Gallery of Patriots, 377
Gangotena y Jijón, Cristóbal de, 361
García Márquez, Gabriel, 1, 8,
46n1, 303–344
García Moreno, Gabriel, 45, 148, 349,
350, 353–356, 358, 359, 361,
363, 364, 367, 369n14,
370n31, 482
Garfield, James A., 230
Gauchos, 453
512  INDEX
General Council, 89
Geneva College/Hobart College, 244
Georgetown University, 257
Germany, 125, 132, 186, 232, 233,
272, 282, 463
Gervinus, Georg Gottfried, 44
Gil, J., 43, 95n14, 95n16, 101,
119–151, 155, 158, 167, 171,
173–176, 178, 180, 187, 197n3,
198n18, 206, 219, 272, 296,
320, 416, 472
Gil Fortoul, José, 43, 95n14, 95n16,
101, 119–151, 158, 167, 171,
173–176, 178, 180, 182–184,
187, 188, 192, 196, 197n3,
198n18, 206, 207, 209, 210,
219, 221, 245, 272, 296,
320, 472
Gilded Age, 210, 452
Globalism, 11
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 202, 407
Gómez, Juan Vicente, 23, 24, 104,
119, 120, 123, 132, 139, 146,
149, 155–157, 160, 165, 167,
168, 171, 173, 174, 176–181,
185, 191, 198n7, 206, 210, 211,
221, 271, 272, 274, 298, 299,
364, 367, 372, 394n1, 437, 450,
461, 480
Gómez, Laureano, 314, 317, 320, 323
Gómez Báez, Máximo, 104
González, Juan Vicente, 80, 205, 214,
215, 225n21
González, Robert Alexander,
235, 253n11
González Suárez, Federico, 360
Good Neighbor Policy, 237, 250, 263
Gorriti, Juana Manuela, 427, 441n5
Government Council, 58, 80
Government Palace, 335
Governors Room, 228
Granada, 32, 320, 321, 365
Gran Colombia, 6–11, 22, 28–31, 33,
39, 41–43, 45, 59, 60, 62–67, 72,
77, 78, 82–84, 86, 87, 90, 92,
95n14, 95n16, 96n17, 100, 101,
105–110, 112–116, 129–131, 134,
135, 139, 140, 143, 147, 148,
161, 174, 175, 184, 187, 196,
215, 219, 220, 228, 234, 244,
263, 265, 272, 273, 288, 289,
296, 298, 303–308, 320, 324,
327, 329, 337, 339, 341, 342,
344n8, 345n9, 351, 352, 354,
357, 365, 366, 377, 386–388,
399, 424, 438, 439, 450, 451,
466n13, 471, 472, 474–476, 481
Great Britain, 13, 33, 36, 124,
260, 396n21
Great Depression, 250
Greece, 355, 400, 407, 481
Grillo, Max, 308–311, 322
Groot, José Manuel, 283
Guabino (plains person), 479, 480
Gual Escandón, Pedro, 131
Guayaquil, 7, 28, 47n4, 63, 104, 158,
168n6, 183, 184, 199n19,
199n20, 199n21, 245, 257, 258,
304, 350, 352–354, 372, 388,
440, 446, 450, 459–465, 475
Guerra Chica, 309
Guerrero, Vicente, 2, 67, 373, 374,
376, 453
Guevara, Che, 412
Gusmancist Liberals, 131
Gutiérrez Navas, Daniel, 261
Guyana, 63
Guzmán, Antonio Leocadio, 80, 83,
143, 192
Guzmán Blanco, Antonio, 14, 88–93,
99, 100, 103, 123, 141, 142,
155, 165, 167, 189, 194, 205,
206, 214, 215, 265, 272, 319,
357, 364, 397, 433, 434

H Homer, 355
Habsburgs, 33–35, 161, 377, 389
Haiti, 5, 6, 27, 30, 57, 66, 68, 70, 71,
86, 112, 186, 239, 256, 261,
337, 339, 384, 385, 476
Halperín Donghi, Tulio, 443–447
Harding, Warren G., 250,
255–257, 260
Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 244
Harrison, Benjamin, 231, 395n21
Hatchie, 243
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich,
282, 382, 454
Heidegger, Martin, 463
Helg, Aline, 26, 58, 68, 70,
197, 336
Hemisphere, 2, 13, 36, 43, 44, 108,
113, 122, 164, 179, 231, 232,
235, 237, 239, 240, 242, 256,
259, 289, 292, 295, 299, 315,
361, 378, 389, 423, 446, 448
Henderson, Peter V.N., 363, 367
Henness, Heather, 428, 429
Henríquez Ureña, Pedro, 19
Hermosillo, Mexico, 374
Hernández Carrillo, Jorge, 308
Hernández, Juan Manuel (El
Mocho), 172
Hidalgo y Costilla, Miguel (Miguel
Hidalgo), 246, 248, 249
High Court of Justice, 58, 106, 107
Hispanic America, 49n27, 133
Hispanic American Literary Society of
New York, 101
Historic home, 173, 179, 188, 213
Historicism, 218
Holiday, 91, 268
Holland, 156
Holy Alliance, 4, 61, 62, 65,
66, 101, 158, 166, 234,
248, 329, 374
Hombría (manliness), 275
 INDEX  513
Hoover, Herbert, 44, 250–252, 260,
262, 263, 267, 268
Hotel Biltmore, 257
House Committee Investigating
Un-American Activities, 380
House museum, 172, 192, 213
House of Commons, 88, 159
House of Lords, 88
Hudson, Guillermo, 19
Huerta, Victoriano, 380, 390
Humanities, 19, 69, 136, 201, 203,
204, 209, 211, 289, 330, 332,
362–364, 401, 447, 451, 454,
455, 467n20
Human Rights Watch, 238
Humboldt, Alexander, 55, 264, 340,
383, 384
I
Ibañez Aria, Nicolasa, 327
Ibarra, Thomas Russell, 263, 265, 266
Iberia, 293
Iberian Peninsula, 4, 61
Iduarte, Andrés, 372
Iglesia del Carmen Bajo, 350
Independentist, 35, 36, 38, 57, 70,
87, 111, 141, 160, 163, 188,
246, 374
Indigenous, 3, 10, 18, 19, 57,
70–72, 88, 102, 108, 109,
123, 124, 155, 164, 174, 176,
191, 241, 268, 274, 291, 330,
341, 353, 363, 376, 391, 400,
401, 403, 404, 408–410,
414–417, 424, 435, 436, 448,
449, 485n12
Indio (mixed race), 27
Infante, Leonardo, 106, 107, 112
Ingenieros, José, 406, 451
Inquisition, 373, 433
514  INDEX
Insurrection, 10, 60, 78, 90, 119,
125, 126, 149, 155, 172, 173,
176, 193, 213, 475
Intellectual Cooperation, 251
Intendencia/Intendencias, 34, 435
Intendancy/ies, 34, 111, 435
International Bureau of American
Republics, 231, 236
International Union of American
Republics, 231, 236
Isabel I, 470, 471, 473
Iturbide, Agustín Jerónimo de,
1, 42
J 119, 125, 129, 130, 133, 134,
Jackson, Andrew, 186
Jacobins, 298
Jamaica Letter, 2, 5, 11, 22, 57,
68–70, 72, 73, 87, 88, 133, 140,
141, 180, 181, 246, 269, 270,
287, 288, 316, 332, 373, 384,
432, 448
Jefferson, Thomas, 243
Jerónimo Feijoó, Benito, 208
Jim Crow, 295
John Hopkins University Press,
267, 482
Johnson, Andrew, 273, 390
Jordán Pando, Roberto, 415,
416, 420n33
Jovellanos, Gaspar Melchor de,
202–203, 270
Juarez (film), 375–377, 380, 381,
388, 391, 394n13, 396n29
Juárez, Benito, 16, 233, 377–379,
385, 389, 390, 393
Judaism, 381
Junta Suprema de Liberación Nacional
(Supreme Council of National
Liberation), 156, 176
Junta Suprema 1810, 55
K
Kelsey, Albert, 232
Kissinger, Henry, 32
L
Lacroix, Luis Peru de, 293, 294
Lafond, 183–185, 449, 458, 460–464
Lake Titicaca, 414
Lancasterian Method, 20
La Paz, Bolivia, 4, 64, 103, 372,
397–399, 407, 410, 481
La Rotunda, 176, 180
Larrazábal, Felipe, 43, 78, 80–87, 89,
90, 92–94, 99, 102, 105, 115,
141, 143, 164, 165, 171, 196,
214, 215, 223, 334, 340, 354,
355, 482
Las Casas, Bartolomé de, 70, 109,
293, 294
Latin America/Latin American, 1, 59,
81, 99, 119, 157, 174, 204, 228,
256, 282, 310, 354, 371, 400,
424, 443, 470
Latin American Boom, 323
La Tribuna (The Tribune), 161
La Violencia, 187, 240, 298, 309
l’Aventino, Aventino Hill, 39
League of Nations, 241, 249, 259,
289, 406–408, 437
Leal, Fernando, 16
Leal Curiel, Carole, 91
Lecuna, Vicente, 24, 31, 43, 120,
171–197, 201, 202, 204, 206,
213, 283, 284, 290, 296, 406,
410, 440, 460
Leguía, Augusto, 267, 435, 437–439
Le Havre, 265
Lexington, Massachusetts, 259
Libertador (film), 9, 55, 309, 350,
416, 431, 451

Libertador/Liberator, 6, 9, 28, 37,
40, 56, 64, 72, 91, 93, 99, 102,
104, 106, 109, 115, 134, 165,
166, 180, 183–185, 189, 214,
228, 243, 246, 251, 252, 261,
267, 275, 296, 304, 306, 325,
335, 338, 350–352, 357, 375,
377, 386–388, 415, 425, 427,
431, 432, 447, 448, 453, 477,
478, 484n12
Libertador Simón Bolívar Room, 228
Library, 19, 235, 247, 430
Library of the Presidency of the
Republic, 311
Licenciado Villacindio, 139
Liévano Aguirre, Indalecio, 316,
320–322, 328–330, 339, 469,
470, 472, 483
Lima, Peru, 63, 136, 183, 245, 270,
352, 353, 423, 424, 429, 431,
435, 446, 481
Limantour, José Yves, 122
Lincoln, Abraham, 115, 259, 295,
378, 389
Lindsay, Miranda, 331–333, 337
Lineage, 54, 128, 143, 167, 192–194,
323, 352
Llaneros (plainsmen), 162, 163,
321, 453
Localism, 39, 142
Locke, John, 20
Lockey, Joseph Byrne, 179, 229
Lofstrom, William Lee, 411, 412
Lombroso, Cesare, 23, 120
López, José Hilario, 365, 366
López Contreras, Eleazar, 179, 180,
185, 195, 208, 211, 221, 274
Loria, Achille, 146
Lynch, John, 25–33, 35, 42, 53, 54, 56,
63, 72, 74n16, 88, 106, 113, 128,
135, 147, 161, 162, 197, 217,
334, 339, 386–387, 447, 481
 INDEX  515
M
Machado, Gustavo, 208, 372
Machiavellianism, 458
MacKenzie, Aeneas, 378, 389
Madariaga, Salvador de, 189–192,
281, 284, 316, 387, 440, 473
Madero, Francisco, 375, 379, 380,
382, 390
Madrid, 14, 35, 57, 65, 82, 156–158,
165, 192, 339
Magdalena, 325, 334, 343
Manco Kapac, 414
Manifiesto de Cartagena, see Cartagena
Manifesto
Man of Laws, 306, 307, 320,
322, 324
Mantuano, 5, 44, 57, 110, 114, 166,
173, 178, 183, 188, 295,
296, 341
Manuela Sáenz Museum, 351
Marcus Garvey Hall of Culture, 227
María Luisa (García Márquez),
337, 338
Mariátegui, José Carlos, 268, 269,
317, 435, 438, 440
Mariño, Santiago, 58, 59, 128, 295
Marshall, George, 237, 239, 240, 298
Marshall, Phyllis, 263, 286
Martí, José, 13, 14, 16, 25, 28, 43,
45, 99–116, 119, 132, 188, 204,
212, 230, 317–319, 341, 342,
364, 386, 445, 472, 473, 483
Martin, Percy Alvin, 246, 263, 290
Marx, Karl, 24, 131, 190, 208, 211,
244, 326, 435, 476, 477
Masur, Gerhard, 16, 25, 69, 264,
281–299, 314, 444, 445,
475, 483
Matos, Manuel Antonio, 78, 99, 123,
132, 138, 172
Mausoleum, 91, 194
McBeth, Brian S., 394n1
516  INDEX
McGann, Thomas F., 365, 366
McKinley, William, 229, 235
Menton, Seymour, 347n55
Mestizo (mixed race), 3, 5, 12, 26, 27,
102, 111–113, 128, 176, 183,
190, 191, 194, 196, 257, 271,
341, 373, 401, 435, 436,
440, 485n12
Metropolitan Cathedral, 360
Mexican Society of Geography, 372
Mexico City, 30, 33, 102, 181, 208,
231, 270, 372, 374
Michelet, Jules, 300n4, 465n5
Mijares, Augusto, 20–22, 31, 68, 217,
220, 223
Miners’ Housewives’ Committee, 412
Mining, 26, 29, 38, 241, 256,
408, 411–414
Miranda, Francisco de, 11, 38–40, 55,
56, 108, 129, 136, 138, 182,
196, 197, 206, 207, 211, 212,
244, 246–248, 250, 265, 266,
286, 331–333, 337, 344, 446, 457
Miranda, Santiago, 342–344
Miranda Archive, 206
Mistral, Gabriela, 239
Mitre, Bartolomé, 28, 124, 168, 184,
250, 251, 444–450, 453,
457, 458
M-19, 311, 343
Modernismo, 407, 452
Monagas, Domingo, 114
Monagas, José Gregorio, 80, 86, 90,
100, 130, 206, 472
Monagas, José Tadeo, 79, 80, 83, 86,
87, 89, 90, 130, 131, 134, 180,
193, 206, 273, 472
Monroe, James, 60–62, 92, 159, 160,
233, 234, 252, 255
Monroe Doctrine, 62, 156, 159,
232–234, 249, 250, 252, 255,
329, 389, 390, 455
Montaigne, Michel, 316
Montalvo, Juan, 45, 167, 354–357,
359, 361–365, 367, 451, 482
Montesquieu, Charles Louis de
Secondat, 20, 21, 69, 72, 73,
126, 136, 212, 216, 220, 246,
340, 414
Montes Sacros of Rome, 55
Monteverde, Domingo de Juan, 39,
42, 55, 57, 84, 106
Montilla, Mariano, 334, 337
Moral Branch, 22, 73, 138, 182
Morales, Evo, 416, 417, 421n55
Morillo, Apolinar, 365, 366
Morillo, Pablo, 5, 57, 60, 69, 84, 93,
141, 163, 164, 196, 406
Morrow, Dwight, 380, 381
Mosquera, Joaquín, 7, 8, 67, 306,
341, 365, 366, 438, 453
Movimiento Alianza País, 351
Movimiento Nacional Revolucionario
(MNR), 317
Mujer-hombre, 428
Mujer-mujer, 428
Mulatto, 128, 295, 384
Muni, Paul, 276, 285
Murillo, Pedro Domingo, 397,
409–411, 413
Murray, Pamela, 351, 428, 429
Mussolini, Benito, 150, 160, 286,
318, 376, 383, 461
N
Naples, 60
Napoleonic Code of 1804, 24
Napoleonic Wars, 55, 163, 274
Nariño y Alvarez, Antonio, 62
National Academy of History, 12, 93,
196, 213, 311, 362
National Academy of Sciences, 372
National Archive, 181
National Front, 309–311
National Museum of Anthropology, 392

National Museum of Colombia, 313
National Pantheon of Venezuela, vi
National Preparatory School, 16, 122
National Treasury, 89, 172
Navas E., Juan de Dios, 362
Neruda, Pablo, 13–16, 25, 415, 472,
473, 479, 483
Nevado (dog hero), 335
New Granada, 1, 5, 17, 26–28, 34,
37, 45, 56, 57, 59, 60, 62, 63,
68, 79, 88, 95n16, 107, 111,
114, 148, 164, 182, 245, 258,
274, 303, 305, 306, 324, 353,
355, 357, 358, 362, 365, 366,
387, 424, 450, 476
New Spain, 4, 102, 373
New York, 13, 105, 116, 243, 257,
273, 315, 316, 318, 322,
345n16, 389
New York and Bermúdez
Company, 132
New York City (NYC), 13, 81,
99–104, 132, 195, 252, 257,
262, 263, 267, 297, 372, 382,
388, 482
Nicaragua, 32, 256, 261, 395n21
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 209, 407
Nixon, Richard, 32, 413
North America, 40, 105, 204, 247
Notre Dame, 55
Numancia Battalion, 429
O 99–101, 106–108, 126, 129–132,
OAS Annex, 228
Obama, Barack, 268
Obando, José María, 306, 355, 357,
358, 362, 365, 366
Obregón, Alvaro, 15, 378
O’Brien, Thomas F., 256
Ocampo, Melchor, 379
Ocaña, 7, 66, 67, 134, 135, 258, 304,
305, 327, 336
 INDEX  517
Odysseus, 283, 457, 459
Office of Strategic Services (OSS), 240
O’Higgins, Bernardo, 247, 251, 388
Oil, 14, 30, 123, 160, 179, 186–197,
203, 208, 211, 212, 252,
362, 409
Olañeta, Casimiro, 397
O’Leary, Daniel Florencio, 53, 54, 92,
93, 165, 214, 387, 433
O’Leary, Simón B., 94, 214
Oligarchy, 12, 20, 77, 81, 122, 126,
128, 130, 131, 139, 145, 165,
166, 168, 175, 207, 213, 221,
309, 310, 320, 461
Ong, Walter, 85
Onís, Harriet de, 313
Ortega y Gasset, José, 202, 209
Ortiz, Fernando, 318
Ortiz Rubio, Pascual, 15, 44, 371
Oruro, Bolivia, 398, 410
Ospina Pérez, Mariano, 314, 315,
317, 318
Othering, 46, 144, 392, 393,
443, 445
P
Pacific Coast Anti-Communist
Federation, 377
Padilla, Prudencio, 304, 326, 336,
337, 374
Páez, José Antonio, 3, 5, 11, 60, 63,
65, 67, 77–81, 83, 88–90, 92,
134, 135, 144–148, 151, 196,
206, 220, 304, 321, 337, 338,
386, 387
Pagden, Anthony, 480–482
Palace of Justice, 311, 343
Palacios, José, 1, 114, 192, 331,
334, 335
Palacios, Marco, 303, 304
Palma, Ricardo, 46, 386, 423–440
518  INDEX
Panamá/Panama, 5, 7, 28, 66, 67,
132, 228, 234, 243, 260–262,
289, 307, 321, 328, 334, 337,
372, 415, 439, 475
Panama Canal, 249
Panama Congress, 28, 132, 134, 243,
261, 262, 289, 321, 328, 415,
439, 475
Pan American Airways/Pan Am,
242, 262
Pan American bulletin/Bulletin of the
Pan American Union, 234, 250
Pan American Conference, 105, 262,
299, 315
Pan American Day, 268
Pan Americanism (the movement), 10,
16, 44, 179, 227–252, 260, 262,
263, 266, 268, 272, 285, 290,
292, 313–325, 375, 377–379,
386, 387, 397, 438, 472, 480
Pan Americanist, 237, 256, 263, 269,
281, 283, 298, 313, 379, 390
Pan American period, 32, 228,
242, 475
Pan American Union, 44–46, 108,
173, 186, 229–231, 234–243,
249–252, 256, 257, 259,
261–263, 267, 268, 292, 295,
314, 316, 322, 371, 372, 377,
437, 439, 450, 471, 482
Pan American Union Building, 227,
232, 241, 249, 262
Pan American Union library, 235
Pan America Railways Company, 229
Pancho Villa, 249, 393
Pando, José María, 64
Pan-Slavic movements, 229
Pardo, 26, 27, 40, 57, 58, 63, 87,
183, 190, 191, 195–197, 295,
304, 326, 335–337
Pardocracia, 26, 30, 481
Paris Commune, 145
Parra Pérez, Caracciolo, 206, 207
Party/Partido (political), 15, 16, 22,
88, 92, 125, 131, 144, 173, 185,
192, 220, 221, 223, 230, 251,
291, 299, 303, 305–307, 309,
314, 318, 327, 341, 360,
363–365, 367, 371, 409,
413, 451
Patiño, Antenor, 398, 413
Patiño, Simón, 398, 413
Patria (weekly), 115
Paulmier, Hilah, 268
Paxson, Frederic L., 244–246
Paz, Octavio, 392, 393
Paz Estenssoro, Víctor, 409
Peace Tree, 227
Peña, Miguel, 105–109, 114, 115
Pérez, Carlos Andrés, 18
Pérez, Louis, 112
Pérez Jiménez, Marcos, 79, 176, 185,
188, 189, 195, 208, 211–213,
221, 299, 313, 317, 318
Perón, Juan, 314, 317, 393
Pershing, John G., 249, 437, 438
Peru, 5–8, 10, 11, 27, 28, 32, 34, 46,
60, 63, 64, 66, 68, 102, 135,
137, 140, 182–184, 204, 245,
256, 258, 267–269, 271, 304,
329, 353, 354, 356, 366, 372,
387, 388, 397–400, 402, 403,
406, 409, 414, 423–440, 446,
459, 462
Peru’s First Congress, 245, 403
Peruvian, 16, 46, 111, 137, 258, 267,
271, 290, 305, 317, 326, 366,
372, 400, 404, 424–437,
440, 457
Peterson, Harold F., 259
Pétion, Alexandre, 5, 57, 70–72, 86,
87, 112, 219, 220, 335, 337,
384, 476
Phelps, Dudley, 256

Philippines, 10, 132, 157, 234
Píar, Manuel, 2, 58, 59, 82, 111, 112,
128, 196, 197, 295, 326, 336,
337, 355, 374
Pichincha, 63, 274, 349, 350, 356,
358, 383, 403, 458
Picón Salas, Mariano, 43, 78–80,
94n3, 201–213, 216, 223,
224n2, 225n7, 225n19, 274
Pike, Frederick, 411, 420n36
Pinilla, Sabino, 50n32, 314, 400, 401,
403, 404, 418n5, 418n6,
419n20, 419n23
Pino Suárez, José María, 380
Pizarro, Francisco, 414
Plato, 72, 377
Plaza Bolívar, 90, 303–312, 314, 316,
317, 319–344, 345n10
Plaza de Armas (Arms Square), 90
Plaza del Mercado (Market Square), 90
Poder Moral, 22
Poe, Edgar Allen, 363
Polignac, Jules de, 62, 74n15
Poniatowska, Elena, 392
Porfirian regime, 150, 379
Porfirio Díaz, José de la Cruz, 122,
149, 150, 153n36, 367, 379
Portes Gil, Emilio, 15
Port of La Guaira, 108
Portugal, 60
Positivism, 78, 119–151, 157, 172,
174, 175, 181, 210, 307, 402,
404, 408
Potosí, Bolivia, 30, 258, 410, 413, 417
Praetorians of Echuzuría, 131
Pratt, Mary Louise, 481, 482, 484n12
Preciado, Juan, 416
Primo de Rivera, Miguel, 160
Proletarianization, 256
Property, 21, 33, 71, 88, 115,
144–146, 172, 330, 335, 394n6,
404, 424, 472, 484n12
 INDEX  519
Protestantism, 378, 381
Proust, Marcel, 427
Prudencio R., Roberto, 413, 414,
417, 421n41
Prussia, 61, 67, 69, 234
Pueblos de Nuestra América-Tratado
de Comercio de los Pueblos
(ALBA-TCP ), 351
Puentes, Milton, 309, 310, 345n11
Puerto Cabello, 56, 129, 266, 286
Puerto Rico, 10, 18, 34, 48n16,
48n17, 132, 133, 157, 234–236,
258, 261, 372
Puñal de salud (purification
dagger), 356
Puntofijo Pact, 208, 211–213, 216, 221
Q
Qing, 250
Quetzalcoatl, 373
Quinta Bolívar (country house of
Bolívar), 343
Quintuple Alliance, 61
Quito, 5, 7, 30, 63, 65, 173,
349–351, 353, 354, 358, 360,
362, 383, 387, 399
R
Race, 10, 12, 20, 23–26, 30, 40, 41, 43,
53, 54, 58, 63, 68, 69, 72, 112,
120, 124, 125, 129, 140, 157,
159, 172, 174–176, 179, 182,
190, 191, 196, 203, 205, 212,
219, 258, 260, 292, 294, 295,
317, 318, 321, 326, 330,
335–341, 376, 384, 389, 391,
397, 400–402, 404, 406, 408,
417, 436, 440, 473, 478, 480, 481
See also Black; Casta; Indio; Mestizo;
Pardo; White; Zambo; Zamba
520  INDEX
Radicals, 328
Radio Cavalcade, 276
Railroad, 100, 172, 231, 256,
353, 407
Rama, Ángel, 17–19, 21–23, 25,
48n16, 68, 120, 341, 483
Rebellion, 34, 35, 111, 113, 148,
256, 337
Red Cross Building, 228
Reform, 35, 64, 126, 131, 137, 269,
308, 324, 327, 373, 417, 470,
471, 473
Reign of Terror, 207, 211, 287
Renan, Ernest, 23, 120, 172, 184
René-Moreno, Gabriel, 309
Republicanism, 6, 20, 21, 24, 28, 116,
131, 148, 149, 158, 160, 176,
178, 188, 222, 285, 307,
395n21, 402, 404, 409, 448, 473
Republic of New Granada, 305, 306,
355, 357, 365
Restitution, 308
Restoration, 188, 215, 282, 285, 374,
445, 469
Revista Venezolana (Venezuelan
Review), 100, 106
Revolt, revolution, 3, 8, 25–28, 32,
59–61, 68, 69, 87, 91, 102, 111,
114, 120–122, 128, 130, 131,
142, 145, 147–150, 157, 158,
164, 166, 196, 200n35, 211,
242, 262, 282, 283, 295, 306,
307, 317, 337, 366, 380, 404,
410, 412, 445, 447, 472,
478, 484n12
Reyes, Alfonso, 19, 158, 204, 391
Riaño Cano, Germán, 342
Ridley, Jasper, 390
Riego, Rafael de, 60, 65, 162
Río de la Plata, 6, 28, 34, 37, 46, 64,
102, 247, 248, 402,
406, 443–465
Rioplatense, 318, 450
Rivera, Diego, 16, 376
Robertson, William Spence, 25, 33,
39, 61, 179, 246–249, 286
Roca, Vicente Ramón, 352
Rocafuerte, Vicente, 33, 352–355,
357, 361, 363, 365, 367
Rocha Monroy, Ramón, 416
Rockefeller Foundation, 282
Rodó, José Enrique, 23, 147, 204,
210, 212, 362–364, 386,
451–455, 457, 472
Rodríguez, Simón, 22, 39, 49n29,
54, 55, 167, 186, 264, 321,
337, 382
Rodríguez O., Jaime E., 25, 33–36,
38–42, 56, 58, 135, 183,
269, 450
Rogers, William D., 238
Rojas Paúl, Juan Pablo, 93
Rojas Pinilla, Gustavo, 314
Rojas, Ricardo, 452, 455–462, 464
Roman Empire, 50n34, 70
Romanticism, 110, 214, 326, 329
Rome, 55, 73, 264, 268, 353, 355,
358, 400, 423, 481
Romero, Denzil, 194
Romualdo de la Fuente, 451
Rooke, James, 273
Roorda, Eric Paul, 237
Roosevelt, Franklin Delano (FDR),
237, 250, 252, 263, 267, 268,
276, 315, 377, 378, 389
Roosevelt, Theodore, 232
Roosevelt Corollary, 132, 133, 156,
232, 233, 237, 252, 255
Rorty, Richard, 218
Rosas, Juan Manuel de, 148, 211,
393, 444, 449, 453
Roscío, Juan Germán, 62, 217, 218,
221, 476
Rotunda, 272

Rourke, Thomas, 264, 271–275,
286, 290
Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 3, 20, 21, 24,
29, 37, 56, 69, 72, 73, 115, 134,
136, 165–167, 202, 212,
216–219, 247, 264, 271,
287–289, 292, 321, 330, 331,
335, 340–342
Rowe, Leo, 108, 232, 235, 236, 238,
239, 243, 249–251, 256,
263, 310
Royal and Pontifical Major University
of San Francisco Xavier of
Chuquisaca (USFX), 414
Royal and Pontifical University of St
Francis, see Royal and Pontifical
Major University of San Francisco
Xavier of Chuquisaca (USFX)
Royal Guipuzcoan Company, 126
Rulfo, Juan, 416
Russia, 57, 61, 62, 67, 69, 234
S Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino, 19,
Saavedra, Cornelio, 247
Saavedra Mallea, Bautista, 405
Sacro Monte, Rome, 55, 268
Sáenz, Manuela, 54, 193–195, 296,
330, 333, 344, 350, 351,
427–429, 433
Sáez, José, 362
Safford, Frank, 303, 304
St. Patrick’s Cathedral, 263
Salas, Antonio, 362
Salas, Tito, 173, 188
Salaverria, José María, 24
Salavarrieta, Policarpa, 84, 111
Salcedo-Bastardo, José Luis, 12–13,
188, 214, 469–473
Sambrano Urdaneta, Oscar, 23
San Francisco Convent, 103
San Juan Massacre, 412
 INDEX  521
San Martín, Conrado, 196
San Martín, José de, 11, 12, 28, 46,
63, 102, 104, 134, 136, 158,
183, 184, 244–247, 257–259,
267, 319, 388, 397, 423–425,
427–430, 440, 443–464
Sánchez, Rafael, 96n27
Sandino, Augusto César, 256, 415
Sanjinés, Jorge, 412
Santa Anna, 373, 379, 393
Santa Iglesia Catedral de Quito, 350
Santa Marta, 57, 79, 85, 91, 95n15,
262, 310, 325, 341, 343
Santander, Francisco de Paula, 7, 11,
17, 22, 26, 27, 32, 44, 59,
62–63, 65–67, 84, 106, 107,
135, 161, 181, 183, 258, 259,
292, 296–299, 303–312,
314–316, 319–328, 334, 336,
337, 340–344, 365, 366, 386,
387, 438, 439, 443, 473–476
San Victorino, 106
Sanz, Miguel José, 217, 218, 221
204, 211, 315, 317, 357, 363,
444, 453, 462, 473
Schauffler, Robert Haven, 268
Schell, Maximilian, 123, 196
Schlar, Judith, 287
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 464
Schoultz, Lars, 229, 230
Scott, James Brown, 243
Second Republic, Spain, 5
Secretariat of Foreign Relations, 372
Secretariat of Public Education
(SEP), 15, 375
Sherwell, Guillermo A., 257–259,
262–264, 267, 272, 290, 292,
473, 475, 482, 483
Siles Reyes, Hernando, 405
Siles Zuazo, Hernán, 409
Simón Bolívar (film), 196, 374, 376
522  INDEX
Simón Bolívar Amphitheater, 14
Simón Bolívar Centenary, 16, 272
Simón Bolívar Room, 227, 228
Simón Bolívar Towers, 188
Sistema Único De Compensación
Regional (SUCRE), 351
Skinner, Quentin, 218
Slavery, 5, 20, 27, 29, 38, 56, 64, 68,
71, 72, 80, 86, 87, 112, 124,
191, 327, 373, 385, 472
Smith, Adam, 202, 203
Smith, Joseph, 236
Sociedad Literaria Hispano-Americana
de Nueva York, 100
Sociedad Patriótica (the Patriotic
Society), 127, 172, 424
Soria, Óscar, 412
Soublette, Carlos, 68, 80, 81, 93,
130, 180
South America/South American, 38,
63, 102, 132, 136, 158, 162,
246, 273, 279n51, 326, 375,
388, 414
Soviet Union, 18, 32, 409, 415
Spain, 2–5, 10, 13, 14, 17, 18, 23, 24,
32, 33, 35, 37, 38, 53–56,
59–62, 64–66, 70, 72, 77, 82,
101, 104, 112, 132, 133, 141,
142, 150, 155–168, 190, 191,
203, 208–211, 223, 234, 244,
246, 247, 269–271, 287–289,
293, 295, 307, 352, 372, 373,
375, 376, 384, 391, 403, 409,
413, 426, 437, 447, 459,
470–472, 476
Spanish America, 2, 35, 39–41, 67,
133, 156, 440
Spanish Civil War, 212, 275, 473
Spanish Cortes, see Cortes
Spanish-Cuban-American War, 10,
119, 132
Spanish-Cuban War, 235
Spencer, Herbert, 104, 120
Spengler, Oswald, 202
State, 1, 55, 78, 99, 122, 157, 172,
202, 227, 255, 281, 303, 349,
371, 398, 423, 445, 475
Statue, 2, 13, 90–92, 103, 111, 164,
195, 227, 228, 241, 251, 252,
255, 261–264, 271, 308, 318,
349, 350, 353, 354, 423, 450,
470, 471, 473
Stead, William Thomas, 156
Stein, Barbara H., 32
Stein, Stanley J., 32
Stendhal, 457
Sucre, Antonio José de, 5, 8, 9, 11,
29, 45, 46, 63–65, 101, 104,
137, 177, 183, 184, 195, 246,
248, 251, 274, 306, 349,
397–406, 408, 409, 411, 412,
414, 416, 417, 424, 432,
453, 458
Sucre (currency), 349, 352, 357–359
Sucre (place), 27, 414
Suez, 401
Superior War Council, 58
Supreme Court, 311, 343
T
Tacna-Arica Plebiscitary
Commission, 437
Tacubaya Congress, 379
Taft, William Howard, 249, 256
Taine, Hippolyte, 50n34, 120, 151,
307, 345n10, 404
Tamayo, Franz, 400, 401, 403, 404,
407–409, 418n9, 421n41
Tammany Hall, 297, 298
Tarde, Gabriel, 120, 144
Tax, 437
Temperley, H.W.V., 74n15, 159, 160,
168n4, 253n10

Thousand-Day War, 307, 309
Tiempo, El (newspaper), 313
Tocqueville, Alexis de, 156
Tomb, 91, 194
Toro, Fermín, 80
Toro Alayza, María Teresa del, 54
Torre, Miguel de la, 60
Torres, Juan José, 412, 413
Toynbee, Arnold, 202
Trade Council, 58
Tradición/Tradiciones, 425, 429, 430,
432, 459
Treaty, 36, 61, 62, 234, 307, 374,
407, 437
Trejo Castillo, Alfredo, 261
Triana, Jorge Alí, 342
Tribuna de Venezuela (The
Venezuelan Tribune), 161
Trienio Adeco (Adeco
Triennium), 185
Trippe, Betty Stettinius, 253n16
Trippe, Juan, 262
Trujillo, Rafael, 42, 82, 139,
187, 237
Truman, Harry S., 240, 250, 268, 314
Tuberculosis (TB), 1, 8, 9, 94, 96n30,
129, 326, 331
Tupac Amaru, 111, 113
U 97n30, 148, 306, 308, 309, 314,
Ugarte, Manuel, 259, 450
Unamuno, Miguel de, 23, 24, 159
Union of American Republics, 231,
236, 241
Union of American States, 232
Unión Republicana Democrática
(URD) (The Democratic
Republican Union), 208
Unitarianism, 59
Unitarios, 449
United Fruit, 256, 312
 INDEX  523
United Kingdom (UK), 4, 61–63, 66,
73, 132, 159, 160, 232–234,
247, 274, 328, 386, 395n21,
439, 481
United Nations (UN), 46, 201, 227,
237, 238, 289, 323, 415, 438, 471
United Nations Educational, Scientific
and Cultural Organization
(UNESCO), 201
United Provinces of New
Granada, 57, 62
United Provinces of Río de la Plata, 64
United States Agency for International
Development (USAID), 240
United States Congress, 230, 263
United States Department, 256, 257
United States Labor Department, 380
United States of America/U.S.,
242–250, 252, 279n48, 375
United States of Venezuela, 88, 135
Universidad del Noroeste, 374
Universidad Nacional/National
University, 372, 375
Universidad Panamericana, 261
University of Buenos Aires, 456
University of Charcas, 414
University of New Mexico Press, 282
University of Texas Press,
196, 347n55
Urdaneta, Rafael, 8, 9, 23, 50n30, 94,
341, 365, 366, 453
Urdaneta Arbeláez, Roberto, 314
Uribe, Álvaro, 299
Uribe Uribe, Rafael, 309
Urria Torres, Donato, 416
Uruguay, 18, 32, 46, 48n17, 59, 247,
318, 443, 449, 452
Uslar Pietri, Arturo, 195, 200n43,
224, 228
Uti possidetis (territorial
claims), 28, 450
524  INDEX
V Vitalism, 203, 209
Valdivia, Juan Carlos, 417
Vallenilla Lanz, Laureano, 43, 46,
119–151, 155, 158–160, 162,
163, 167, 171, 173, 174, 176,
178, 180–184, 187, 188, 192,
207, 209, 210, 219–221, 223,
275, 298, 299, 309, 317, 320,
345n10, 367, 372, 391, 401,
402, 404, 410
Vanderwood, Paul J., 377, 378, 389,
390, 394n13
Vargas, Virgilio Barco, 311, 365
Vargas Martínez, Gustavo, 47n12,
374, 392, 394n12
Vasconcelos, José, 15, 16, 45, 47n12,
176, 204, 317, 371–393, 478
Vaucaire, Michel, 264–266
Veblen, Thorstein, 209, 210
Velasco Ibarra, José María, 351
Venezolano (currency), 90, 117n11,
154n42, 214, 225n10,
349, 418n4
Venezuela, 1, 54, 77–94, 99–116,
156, 171, 173, 174, 176, 178,
182, 185, 187–189, 192, 196,
197n3, 198n8, 198n9, 198n11,
198n13, 198n18, 199n22,
200n44, 201–224, 228, 255,
283, 303, 349, 372, 397, 424,
443, 470
Venezuelan Congress, 77, 78, 186,
195, 218
Viceroyalty of New Granada, 32
Viceroyalty of Peru, 5, 32
Videla, Jorge Rafael, 413
Viezzer, Moema, 412
Villanueva, Carlos A., 181, 182,
345n10, 410
Villars, Fanny du, 54, 55
Virgil, 355
Virgin of Guadalupe, 373
von Ranke, Leopold, 16, 125–126,
281, 444
W
Warner Bros., 375, 377–381,
389, 391
War of a Thousand Days, 83, 232, 360
War of Independence, 141, 273
War of Ten Years, 104, 115
War of the Pacific, 29, 230, 406–408,
425, 437
War of the Supremes, 310
War to the Death, Guerra a Muerte, 5,
56, 58, 82, 102, 128, 142, 161,
166, 180, 196, 310, 334, 343,
355, 410
Washington, D.C., 13, 44, 101, 105,
179, 195, 227, 230–232, 236,
241, 242, 251, 254n39, 258,
261, 262, 267, 314, 318, 326,
371, 372, 375, 378, 380, 381,
470, 471
Washington, George, 11, 12, 15, 84,
92, 104, 133, 179, 255–257,
259, 267, 284, 316, 354, 377,
448, 450, 458, 480, 481
Washington Mall, 228
Webb, James Watson, 390
Webster, Daniel, 243
Wellington, Duke of, 60, 62
Werfel, Franz, 388
West, Patricia, 173, 197n1
White, Hayden, 282
White House, 44, 228, 231, 241, 268
White (race), 5, 26, 53, 54, 68, 112,
124, 129, 157, 182, 183, 190,
195, 257, 318, 323, 330, 335,
339, 384, 391, 400, 403, 416,
448, 473
Wilgus, A. Curtis, 179
  INDEX  525

Williams, David Lay, 217, 218, 287 Y

Wilson, Belford Hilton, 1, 388
Wilson, Henry Lane, 380
Wilson, Woodrow, 235, 249
Wisconsin (ship), 307
Women, 87, 111, 164, 271, 293,
331–333, 338, 413, 425, 427,
430, 431, 434, 435, 459,
481, 485n12
World Court, 232
World War I, 181, 242, 245, 249,
259, 264, 450, 475
World War II, 21, 212, 217, 237, 250,
264, 281–299, 323
Yrigoyen, Hipólito, 251, 259,
455, 456
Z
Zamba (mixed race), 183
Zambo, 330
Zamora, Ezequiel, 81, 205,
225n10
Zapotec Indian, 378, 389
Zea, Francisco Antonio, 59, 62, 324
Zimmerman (Jorge Luis Borges), 463
Zola, Émile, 264