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 indicative 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 subject 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 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 figure 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 monumental 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 critical 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 spoken, 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 consisted 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 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 institutional 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 centrality 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, publisher 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 prominently 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 compete 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 publishing. 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, 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, professional 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, presenting 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 committing anything to writing. That understandable lack of sources together with Mitre’s forward-moving history that supplies to Argentina through freemasonry a modern intellectual San Martín would not be easy to contest. 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 professional opportunities in the Spanish army once the Napoleonic conflict is over—the fact that he is from the Americas dooming him in that hierarchical 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 revolution, 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 embriónicos de las nueva sociabilidad), the rich mass of humanity (la masa viva), the popular forces (las fuerzas populares), the secret forces of collective consciousness (las fuerzas ocultas de las conciencias), and the collectivity (la colectividad). Not properly acted upon from above by caudillos and politicians, 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 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 present San Martín, not Bolívar, as the true American statesman. He thus gives the Venezuelan’s writings short shrift when not discarding them altogether, 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 demonstrate 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 doctrine 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 independence creoles, whether Mexican, Colombian, Argentine, or other, had first to establish hegemony over cultures that were “non-Western.”
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 economic independence in the face of what is described as a backward, reactionary 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 mercilessly 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 necessary. 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 political 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 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 exercise 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 dissolution 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 promoting 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 hemispheric aspirations of the Pan American Union. But in the years ahead, with Pan Americanism, the Mexican Revolution (1910–1917), the dictatorship 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 promote. 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 nineteenth 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 societies. 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 edition 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 containing 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 formal field of study for learning the values necessary for productive citizenship.
Rodó wrote as insider and outsider with regard to the Argentine tradition, 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 representative 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 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 archetypes. Bolívar represents that of ambition, and San Martín that of abnegation. 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 independence 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 celebrating 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 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 provisional dictatorship of 1828–1830, called El Congreso Admirable, seen another voted president (Mosquera ), and witnessed from afar the assassination 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 positive terms, characterizing the charismatic function associated with the caudillo as necessary to the building of a revolutionary movement. To do this, he blends together Argentine and Venezuelan history, defining the llaneros (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 countryside 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 political 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 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 multifaceted 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 psychology, 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 spontaneity and intimateness while describing his political documents as classicism 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 signifying 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 understand 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.
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 independence, 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 independence,’ 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 youth, Rojas tells his readers, will have the task of correcting the mistakes 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 producing 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 hearkened back to Yrigoyen’s defining stance as the leader of the Radical Party—non-participation in elections characterized by fraud. His statements 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
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
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 decision not to allow San Martín to serve under him, underlining instead the facts of power. Rojas goes in the opposite direction, using the Lafond letter 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 expeditionary 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 prowess as a strategist, then, he is an exceptional leader around whom soldiers and officers rally, following him because of the knightly idea of self-sacrifice 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 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 compare 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, serving 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 relationship to Rosa Campusano using the tradiciones of Ricardo Palma of which we have spoken in Chap. 16. Citing them, he affirms Campusano’s political influence for independence but he finesses in this way her sexual relationship 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 military 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 daughter. He has decided to expatriate himself from Buenos Aires. Rojas presents 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 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 critique, 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 compromised 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 hermeneutic, 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.
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 soldiers, 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 contradistinction to the notion of history as narrative, responses which he published 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 verified 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 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 institutional conditions regulating and limiting inquiry into the past. Those who know Borges will not be surprised. His story slowly becomes a parody 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 reproducing 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, monumental 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 understanding how he has suddenly gone from wanting nothing more than to 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 contain the original letter sent by San Martín to Bolívar, in the personal account given to us by the narrator about his interview, nothing is provided 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 “vanquished” 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 different 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 sullying 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 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, unwilling now after his encounter with Zimmerman to risk bringing into disrepute 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 tradition 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 canonical 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 circumstantial information to create a rational stage on which to show the veracity 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 obstacles, whether real or imagined, and intellectual prejudices confronting cultural 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.