Seeking to steer the talented of war-torn Europe to Peru, the jurist, essayist, 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 liberators 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, concerned 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 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 congress, 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 ability 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 normally of interest to the leader’s most ardent critics. They were Bolívar the “dictator” and Bolívar the “womanizer,” which in Peru take on added significance 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 others 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 iterations 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 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 popular 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 language. … 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 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, apprehended 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 interlocutors, 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 filtered through the decades-old Peruvian debate as to who is more important 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 monarchist; 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 dictatorial 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, celebrating, if you like, their identities as the literal linguistic feminine counterparts 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 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 provides, 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, becoming 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—Catholicism versus liberalism—commenting on the irony that Sáenz, who was educated 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 masculinity not simply as instances of the biological self, but also as embodiments 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 contemporary 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, elements of her public as opposed to her private persona that had been previously 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 essentialisms? Is he affirming that Campusano represents a norm, and that Manuela 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 military campaigns they were conducting, and her role as an unofficial member 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 fiction 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, including his own.
Palma’s exploration of female subjectivity in the public sphere in relationship 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 reason 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.
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 historical 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 narrates 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 fictitious.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 concluding 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, 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 opportunity 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 dictator—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, transformed 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 justifying 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 problematic 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:
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 penalized for one man’s actions. The story concludes with the mother continuing 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 resolutely against it. Given both his audience of female readers and his project to present Peruvian social mores of the nineteenth century from the perspective 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, hypocritical 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 expression giving title to the piece.15 “The Letter of the Libertadora” is the letter 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 libertadora. 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 generations, 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 fictionalizes, 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, 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 printers 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 occasion 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, generational conflict, sexual mores, and politics in the context of Peru’s experience with Bolívar and other leaders of independence.
Recalling the Peruvian villager Manolita Madroño, of whose 1824 amorous 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 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 underrepresented 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), published 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, proposing a new breakdown of Peru’s regions to reflect the country’s actual economic centers and industries. To do so, he critiques the process of centralization brought about by the republic, one that created new provinces 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 established 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.
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 purportedly 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 interlocutors, 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 neighbors, would, indeed, mix with Peruvian local populations rather than isolate 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.
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 conditions 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 obligations with Bolivia in a situation in which Bolivia was in fact the aggressor, 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 supported the Dominican Republic when Spain occupied it in 1867. He also addresses Peru’s and Latin America’s relationship to the new world organization 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 realized Congreso de Panamá, protecting the political rights of a region; the latter an arm of the United States in which business could be completed, 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 supporting 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 executive 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 military 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 monarchy 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 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 meeting. 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 assassination 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 assassination, 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 critique of Leguía, of Latin American dictatorship, and of the United States, just as would the 1964 edition.
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 continuing 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.