If the story of the circulation of Bolívar’s figure turns on processes involving the formation of national, hemispheric, and academic traditions, the three spaces of engagement sometimes coinciding with one another and other times diverging, the idea that we can step outside all this is fraught with challenges. In fact, even when we claim otherwise, we cannot help but, in some manner, participate in them. All of which is not to cast doubt on the expertise that has been displayed over the decades on Bolívar and his contexts, but rather to emphasize the complexity that defines the thinking and writing of his figure on the geopolitical stage of the Americas. That complexity is, perhaps, easier to recognize in the cases of those interpreters who openly address previous or contemporary interpretations of his figure in their bid to make their vision prevail than it is in that of the vast majority who do not, claiming, to the contrary, that their version constitutes a restoration of Bolívar to his original contexts or to the contexts that, in fact, matter and in whose light we can see him accurately. Yet to follow the path back to any proposed context without understanding the conditions of production of his figure obscures as much as it clarifies, as there is no one place to return to, no rock bottom from which we can narrate, only shifting terrain. To compare, for instance, the places to which the likes of Indalecio Liévano Aguirre (Colombian), José Luis Salcedo-Bastardo (Venezuelan), and David Bushnell (US American) take their readers is to find oneself having to drop anchor at multiple ports.
We have already spoken of the Colombian historian Indalecio Liévano Aguirre in Chap. 11. In particular, we saw how Liévano Aguirre uses the leader’s family’s Basque history to re-define Bolívar’s ethnic and political origins for his readers. The new genealogy he proposes goes directly back to Spain while sidestepping Bolívar’s family’s racial and social identity as defined in Venezuela. It is one that the historian/diplomat adopts to construct a figure representative of social classes in Colombia and that is intended to be in-line with the Liberal populist subject position of the recently assassinated Gaitán. We have yet, though, to speak fully of Salcedo-Bastardo, who occupies an important place among Venezuela’s many Bolívar interpreters, as Carrera Damas underlines in his 1969 Culto a Bolívar (Cult of Bolívar).
Notable for our purposes is one work in particular, José Luis Salcedo-Bastardo’s Bolívar: un continente y un destino (Bolívar: a Continent and a Destiny), published in 1972 at the Organization of American States in Washington, D.C. Salcedo-Bastardo submitted it to the OAS in a competition for best book on Bolívar, with 36 works from 14 different countries among the entries. He won. The purpose of the competition was to select and showcase a history that put a liberal spin on the ideological regional and world struggle of the Cold War in such a manner as to legitimize OAS and US support of the Right. Chile was the immediate concern. In 1970, the country elected the socialist Salvador Allende president. That followed what was the most momentous moment of the Left in twentieth century Latin America, the 1959 Cuban Revolution. The United States, which would help engineer a coup against Allende in 1973, already had a long history of training Latin American military leaders and of creating and/or supporting authoritarian and military governments: the Guatemalan (1954–); the Brazilian (1964–1985); and the Bolivian under Hugo Bánzer (1971–78). Later would come the Uruguayan, (1973–1985); the Chilean, (1973–1989); and the Argentine, (1976–1983).
As part of the Cold War politics, in 1966, two years after the Brazilian military seized power from the country’s elected government to turn back agrarian reform and other social measures, four years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, and five years after the Bay of Pigs, the OAS had erected at its entrance a statue it received from the Spain of Francisco Franco, one of Isabel I, the figure whose marriage to Ferdinand II of Aragon in 1469 became the foundation for the political unification of Spain. The words etched on the statue’s pedestal read: “Isabel I, la católica, reina de Castilla y Aragón, y de las islas y tierra firme del océano mar.” (Isabel 1, the Catholic, Queen of Castille and Aragón, and of the islands and mainland of the Ocean Sea.)1
Invoking the Spanish empire with its vast colonies in the Americas reconstituted through Isabel I—a variation on the concept of unity that served as a foundation for Franco’s fascist Spain—the statue offered a vision of the Americas that was strangely pristine and nostalgic but that could not have been more political, a symbol marking anything in the Latin America of the moment that stood outside what was Catholic- and Spanish-descended as ideological, and therefore disposable. But now the OAS, with its jury of scholars from different countries of the Americas, including an historian from the United States who had earlier critiqued Salcedo-Bastardo, was taking advantage of the wide and deep interest in Bolívar built up over previous decades across the Americas with Venezuela and the United States the major centers of that interest to take advantage once again of his figure.
The scholar who evidently performed that ideological labor for the organization most efficiently, Salcedo-Bastardo represents Bolívar as one who cared deeply about the plight of workers, but also as one who stood for capitalism, responsible administration, and the institutions of liberal society. Salcedo-Bastardo also speaks about the OAS. Ever sensitive to the politics of Washington D.C. and Latin America, in the final pages of his work he purports to lift the OAS out from under the pall of the Pan American Union, explaining to suspect Latin American audiences that the OAS is in fact independent of the United States because it exists under the United Nations’s Charter.2
In Salcedo-Bastardo’s version of Bolívar that neatly avoids reference to Cuba, Brazil, or Salvador Allende , suppressing from view the conditions of its production, and which in the 1977 English-language edition highlights even more the differences between the OAS and the Pan American Union than it does in that of 1972 with a new final chapter titled “Present and Future,”3 he was strategic, hitting several locations in the Bolívar epic to prop up his figure in the way he wanted to and to defend the Gran Colombia as a liberal utopia. Land redistribution is one element Salcedo-Bastardo uses to his advantage.
For decades, Salcedo-Bastardo had been making much of Bolívar’s land redistribution act to compensate the soldiers and officials of his army, seeing in it a form of socialism without being socialism. In his 1972 book, he continued that critical line, presenting Bolívar as a champion of land reform and railing against the generals under him who seized the estates once belonging to the old elites without allowing their properties to be properly parceled and distributed. He names all of them, including Páez and the Monagas brothers, caudillos , as he calls them, who undo Bolívar’s social revolution. Slavery is a second issue he considers in his attempt to position Bolívar as a force of his social liberalism. Páez is once again a foil. In contrast to Bolívar who champions abolition and puts in place a voucher system for slave owners to be compensated for their lost “property,” we are told that Páez, with the 1830 constitution, allows for the return of legalized slavery. The 1859–1863 Federal War is still another discursive space before which Salcedo-Bastardo positions himself.
Speaking of the war, Salcedo-Bastardo tells not of a revolution out of control, as Gil Fortoul does, but of former slaves who have been given their freedom only to return to work at the same plantations to which they had been subjugated, in some cases under more brutal conditions. As for the ideological program of the federalists, he reduces it to an attempt to return to the regional framework that had prevailed in colonial times, centralism simply being the destiny of Venezuela and Bolívar standing for centralism against federalism. Imperialism is still another question he addresses, using this historical reality commonly called upon by actors on the Left to authorize their political positions for the purpose of shoring up the author’s anti-Castro, anti-Allende vision. Salcedo-Bastardo’s Latin America, which he aggressively labels as democratic, code for anti-communist, has suffered at the hands of different imperial powers, first Spain, then the United States (with the Mexican-American war of 1846–1848 and the Pan Americanism movement of 1889 to the 1950s), and France (with the Second Empire’s occupation of Mexico from 1862 to 1867). Finally, he takes a position on the final dictatorship, explaining that because the Gran Colombia was crumbling, Bolívar had no choice but to take power in the manner he did. As for the Admirable Congress, he cites a letter in which Bolívar states that his intention was always to call the congress so as to ensure that the people have a voice.4 The conclusion: Bolívar is not himself dictatorial or desirous of finding ways to remain in power.
How Salcedo-Bastardo presents his relationship to Latin American intellectuals is of particular importance. Eliding entirely ideological difference, he brings together figures from across the political spectrum, from José Martí to Rufino Blanco Fombona and from José Enrique Rodó to Pablo Neruda and Indalecio Liévano Aguirre, as well as actors from outside of Latin America, particularly historians in the United States, Canada, and Europe. In each case, he re-defines the content of their cultural work. We see him do this “with the words of the most important poet of the times in the world—Pablo Neruda,” citing an entire stanza from Neruda’s poem of 1941, “An Ode to Bolívar,” discussed in Chap. 1.5 Delinking those words from their ideological referent, he represents Neruda, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1971, as a spokesperson for liberty, saying nothing of how Neruda in this poem entwines Bolívar with Latin America’s natural resources and the Spanish Civil War ; of the Neruda who subsequently, in the 1940s, becomes a member of the communist party, a Chilean senator representing saltpeter workers in the Atacama Desert, and a powerful defender through his poetry of the Latin American Left; of the Neruda in the 1950s and 1960s who is a critic of figures like the Venezuelan Rómulo Betancourt whom he accuses of selling out to the United States; or of the figure who from the late 1960s through his death on September 23, 1973, is a key supporter of Salvador Allende, having directed the Communist Party in Chile to join forces with the socialist to promote Allende in the 1970 elections. To be sure, Salcedo-Bastardo is making the most well-known Latin American poet of the moment his own, portraying him as a voice for his socially conscious liberalism, not communism.
We see him do something similar with the exiled Spanish writer and diplomat, Salvador de Madariaga of whom we spoke in Chaps. 7 and 16 and who we recall was declared a calumniator by Venezuela’s Bolivarian Society. Using Madariaga’s racist hermeneutic to his advantage, he asserts that Bolívar biologically and geographically represents three races: Indian, black , and white.6 But Madariaga elaborates this racial vision to present Bolívar not as a force for republicanism or democracy but as one who was driven only by his own will to power. All this is finessed by Salcedo-Bastardo, who is going to Madariaga, together with Bolívar’s other interpreters—really, the entire tradition of reflection on his figure, from Sarmiento to Martí to Sherwell and others—for his own ends. That is to have Bolívar contain and resolve through his body, acts, and ideas, as well as the disparate figures who have represented him, issues that have provided a grounding for the Left. Salcedo-Bastardo’s Bolívar stands for change through liberal reforms, education, and collective action, serving as a far more modern instrument for containing and attacking the Left than the Isabel I statue.
As for the US American historian of Bolívar, David Bushnell, of whom we have spoken several times, and who is the third person we name in the opening paragraph, after Liévano Aguirre and Salcedo-Bastando, it is interesting to note that Bushnell started off as a scholar of Francisco de Paula Santander before becoming a scholar of Bolívar as well, producing in 1954 The Santander Regime in Gran Colombia, a book that provides a penetrating archival account of Santander’s record as acting president of the Gran Colombia during the decade of the 1820s. With this work, Bushnell, it could be said, sought to defeat one of the most important binaries governing transmitted knowledge about Bolívar in the United States, Venezuela, and elsewhere: that pitting his figure against a Santander who is legalistic, money-hungry, free-spending, and treacherous, the alleged force behind the September 25, 1828, attempt on Bolívar’s life, and to be sure, the most common straw man against whom Bolívar has been held up as virtuous and visionary. Bushnell chisels out a different figure—a successful and capable leader who as chief executive of the Gran Colombia when Bolívar was in the south defended what he saw as the nation’s interests, a leader, furthermore, whose involvement in the assassination attempt after Bolívar’s return to Bogotá was anything but certain. Why the negative view of Santander in the first place? Bushnell asserts that the Venezuelan elites of the 1820s were concerned about their geographic marginalization from Bogotá, the capital of the Gran Colombia, and for this reason were disposed to casting aspersions on the central government, as when they accused Santander of squandering the British loan of 1824.
In other scholarly work, in a similar effort to rid the historical record of the myth and caricature that in his mind has marred it, Bushnell illuminates the context of several of Bolívar’s often quoted statements, in particular, the one he made against the United States in the late 1820s. As he argues, the statement in question, repeated frequently by those who would present Bolívar as an inveterate critic of the United States, was made in the context of Bolívar’s concern that the power to the north was attempting to stop the Gran Colombia from establishing a relationship with Britain, then its commercial rival. Here, as he would see it, was a verbal act responding to a particular moment elevated over time to represent the essential Bolívar, eclipsing his statements of admiration for US federalism in which he stipulated that such a model was appropriate for the United States but not for Latin America.7
Yet, as Bushnell would affirm, the multiple formulations of Bolívar’s figure that have been constructed over time, certain ones of which he has studied, tell an important story about hemispheric politics and nation construction. As an interpreter in his own right of Bolívar on that stage and of many of the figures associated with him, Bushnell is, of course, a part of it. Indeed, how he came to Santander and to Bolívar is interesting to speculate on, for one can think that it was the Santander revival in Colombia of the 1930s and 1940s that inspired the US American Harvard Ph.D. candidate, motivating him to offer the world an account of the Gran Colombia different from the Bolívar-centered versions that became common during the US-led Pan American period, 1890–1959. As we saw in Chaps. 9, 10, and 11, between World War I and the 1950s, a remarkable number of Venezuelan-slanted historical, biographical, and fictional accounts of Bolívar were produced, including Guillermo Sherwell’s 1921 biography of Bolívar, Gerhard Masur’s masterpiece of 1948, and Waldo Frank’s Bolívar of 1951, the last one which celebrated Venezuelan intellectuals, while denigrating their Colombian counterparts. In this context, a US scholar’s decision in the late 1940s and 1950s to write a book about the Santander administration of the 1820s with an eye to clarifying the Bolívar-Santander binary and supporting Colombian historiography becomes rich with meaning.
Distinguishing between truth and error has been of less significance for this study, then, than inquiring into how the figure of Bolívar together with the leaders with whom he was associated have been brought forth in individual national traditions. Many questions have been asked. What aspects of Bolívar’s acts, decisions, and writings have become “discursive,” acquiring significance in one country but not in another, or at least existing there differently? Understanding, for instance, the importance of General Córdoba’s insurrection for Colombians, of Bolívar’s Liberation Army’s crossing of the Desaguadero for Bolivians, of Bolívar’s Panama Congress for US Americans and their Pan American brethren, of the First Republic for some Venezuelans determined to overcome the legacy of Bolívar’s own words denouncing the civil process in military times, and of the Guayaquil meeting for Argentines is a first and absolutely necessary step in creating the conditions to see that there are different traditions, and that we can engage those traditions both on their own terms and in relation to others. But we have also inquired into what historical factors and ideological issues have driven interest in Bolívar and conditioned the interpretation of his figure. Stating that Venezuelans perceive him differently than do Colombians is important, for instance, but hardly sufficient. They arrive at their understanding of Bolívar by way of a different or uniquely configured set of historical figures, texts, and polemics.
In the Venezuelan tradition, to be sure, the First Republic has a unique meaning, existing as a foundational moment to be celebrated, denied, or otherwise reconstructed in the creation of the state. In contrast, in the Colombian one can speak of only two periods of republics, the sequence of a First, Second, and Third Republic used in Venezuela not applying: the city-states that were in force between 1810 and 1816 in New Granada and that vied with one another for leadership over the independence process (a moment traditionally referred to as the patria boba, with the designation having been contested during the past few decades for being derogatory) and the Gran Colombia with its beginnings in 1819, subsequent to Bolívar’s armies’ victories in Boyacá and Bogotá in 1819. Bolívar, who served the city-state of Cartagena, just as he did that of the Tunja in the early years, would come down in the Colombian tradition filtered through his relationship to Francisco de Paula Santander. Simply put, as has been argued throughout this book, when it comes to narrating Bolívar’s story and, more generally, that of independence, nation matters.
To illustrate this point with an extended example, let us consider the case of the 1858 encyclopedia entry written by Karl Marx about Bolívar, a text that has received sporadic attention over the years in different interpretive spaces, including those of the Mexican, Argentine, and US academies, as well as the Spain of the Civil War at the hands of the Soviets, as we saw in Chap. 1. It also entered public discourse in Venezuela during the Chávez years. Marx wrote the entry for the third volume of Charles Dana’s New American Cyclopedia, basing it in large part on the 1831 British edition of Ducoudray-Holstein’s history and refusing to make any changes to it when queried by the editor. In the entry, Marx portrays Bolívar as a scion of the Caracas aristocracy who was favored throughout his military career by circumstance, bringing to the attention of the reader the important acts of three lesser known individuals without whose assistance he alleges the leader would have either died in battle or failed to acquire needed funding—his uncle, José Félix Ribas; the Dutchman, Luis Brión, who secured him ships and soldiers; and Juan Germán Roscío, a Venezuelan financier. Curiously, Marx leaves out, the president of Haiti, Pétion. The image that emerges is that of a hapless, entirely unworthy figure who retreats in moments of peril and who takes credit for the deeds of others, a figure whose heroism has been invented, the real story of his life being that of his numerous acts of cowardice as well as his extraordinary will to power. Why Marx would choose to write an entry on Bolívar on the basis of this source and only one other has been the subject of much speculation, especially when, as Hal Draper has shown, Marx chose to write the entry himself rather than have it written by Engels, who composed the majority of the encyclopedia entries that appear under his name.8 For some, Marx wanted to defeat or problematize the great-man theory by providing a lesson on the perils of biography and historiography, as evident, as he would have it, in the entries of other national encyclopedias from the time that offered entirely positive views of the Liberator. For others, his critics, Marx displays in this short piece as well as in other writings on Latin America a Hegelian perspective that prevented him from seeing the new republics as anything but ahistorical societies repeating European stories, with Bolívar representing a figure with Bonapartist ambitions.
That Marx’s encyclopedia entry would surface again in Chávez’s Venezuela is hardly surprising, though it should be noted that in the creation and defense of Latin America’s Left tradition, the entry has rarely been referred to, much less focused on, by those interested in contesting the Left’s long-standing claims on Bolívar. General economic, social, and historical principles have been debated in relation to major works by Marx, and of course, the Left has been violently persecuted, most notoriously between the 1960s and the 1980s, with the Communist Party being declared illegal and its members and affiliates targeted, imprisoned, and killed by the state, but there has been no occasion for individual national debate about Marxist interpretations of Bolívar, never mind one about Marx’s own remarks about the personage with whom he would one day be linked not negatively but positively in Latin America. Witness that absence in critical discussion of what was the longest-standing Marxist group in Latin America, the FARC in Colombia, which laid claim to Bolívar’s military legacy and used as its symbol a sword that purportedly once belonged to him, or in critical discussion of the Cuban Revolution, which places Bolívar next to Che. But in a nation that, historically, has seen itself as custodian of Bolívar’s legacy and in which a person regarded as an “interloper” succeeded in obtaining political power in great part through the local prestige of that legacy, how could a massive debate about Bolívar’s relationship to Marx not have occurred and how, then, could the encyclopedia entry not have resurfaced? A gift for the Center and for the Right, it only had to be posted on the Internet or quoted from to reinforce the case against Chávez, namely that his political persona was a contradiction. How could this leader who crafted his political script so carefully using Bolívar’s words and acts speak of a Marxist Bolívar if Marx himself had no respect for this liberal, denouncing him as an impostor while also labeling him among other things dictator?
It was not only Chávez’s critics who addressed the coherence of his symbolic language; some of his supporters did as well. The fact was that Chávez, in performing Bolívar on the Venezuelan national stage, in purporting to embody in important aspects of his project the Bolivarian spirit, was at risk, particularly, at the beginning of his presidency, of becoming opaque to the public, his symbols reducible to totems, meaningful to him and other Venezuelans but to no one else, of becoming, therefore, all the more vulnerable to attack if not because of the revolution of which he spoke and which was the target of a US-backed coup, then because of such theatrical antics as that of appearing seated in public with a place next to him reserved for Bolívar. Responding to this new form of political theater, the Mexican intellectual Heinz Dieterich, who came to Chávez’s defense early in his tenure, sought to mediate the leader’s ideological position beyond Venezuela’s debate about biographical and textual fidelity to the Liberator.
The Commander reasons in a sequential and didactic manner like the great thinker Fidel Castro; he comes from the people and has kept close to it, using his charisma to maintain that essential connection for the sake of change; he possesses humility in his dealings with the masses, he loses himself among them without fear of assassination, and sublimates reality by way of what we call “humour” in acts that, for an instant, dissolve our individuality into a great community of vibrant entities supportive of one another, united among themselves.9
Dieterich portrays the then-new leader such as to connect past to present, defining him as the new embodiment of the “Leftist” dream of Bolívar’s patria grande, the Latin American Left having not had strong, global voices since the times of Pablo Neruda and the Sandinistas, who fell out of power in 1991 as a result of the US-sponsored Contra War, and having been attacked for decades by US Cold War policies and dealt a new blow by the neo-liberalism of the 1990s.
If some on the Latin American Left sought to package Chávez in the early years of his tenure, on the Right, there were efforts to do the same, as in the case of the Venezuelan philosopher Oscar Reyes, who, voicing the sentiment of the middle class that had voted for him in mass in the first elections, proposes that the Marxist framework of his administration would give way to a new liberalism. To this end, in an essay entitled “Una explicación muy llanera de Chávez” (“A Very Plain Explanation of Chávez”) that plays on the politically fraught word “plains,” Reyes also explains Chávez’s relationship both to tradition and to Castro.10 In contrast to Dieterich, he presents the confluence of different if not incompatible traditions in Chávez’s thought—Bolivarianism and Marxism among the most important of these, to be sure—not as a reflection of the frequently formulated vision of a Latin America defined by intellectual and cultural traditions rooted in mixing and hybridity, but as an effect of the mental operations of the Venezuelan country-person or guabino of the plains who, as the author states with no small amount of classist and racist vitriol, compulsively repeats what his interlocutors say to him, searching always for agreement. On the subject of Chávez’s relationship to Castro, Reyes, similarly, to reduce ideology to quaint and child-like localism, asserts that there were no essential connections between the two, that the oratory of Chávez, characterized by long and rambling speeches just like that of the Cuban leader, should not be regarded as evidence that Chávez was following Castro, but rather seen in the light of the natural loquacity of the character of the guabino that he imagined. Ultimately it is the purported impressionability of this caricature of Venezuelan rural people that is of greatest interest as a category of analysis to the extremely patronizing Reyes whose formulations reflect the paradigms of white privilege put in place by the elites who succeeded the Gómez era. Comparing his guabino Chávez to Woody Allen’s Zelig, the human sponge or chameleon character created by the US American director in the 1980s, Reyes presents Chávez as a leader incapable of thinking for himself, and what’s more, in accordance with that metaphor, as a natural impersonator. Like others at the time who wanted to believe that Chávez was nothing but a puppet of more radical advisors whose values he had adopted, Reyes was offering hope to the liberal Center and the Right, namely that this “boy from the country” could end up on the other side of the political spectrum if surrounded by the right people. It was the dream of a political and cultural elite that, as Judith Ewell would say, hearkened back to the days of Páez and Gómez, leaders who surrounded themselves with established intellectuals.
Bolívar: Gateway to the International Academy
Finally, outside of Latin America during the decades subsequent to those of Pan Americanism (1889–1950s), interest in Bolívar’s figure has been alive and well, serving as a foundation for economic, social, and race theories in academic debates, as we saw in Chaps. 1 and 2, with the differences in the interpretation of his figure a reflection of the critical and ideological work performed. One important example is that of British political theorist Anthony Pagden who in the midst of the neo-liberalism rage of the early 1990s brought out in 1995 Lords of All the World, Ideologies of Empire in Spain, France, and Britain c. 1500 to c.1800. Here Pagden finds in Bolívar a malleable figure for the world history he produces, activating the Bolívar-Washington dyad of which we have spoken previously. Using this dyad to define the history of the Americas through the action or nonaction of its “great figures,” Pagden faults Bolívar for failing to live up to the standard set by Washington by refusing to disband his army until it disbanded on its own at the time of his expulsion from Bogotá.
The primary criticism that Pagden launches, however, is in regard to Bolívar’s view of markets, as he rips into him for not embracing the modern concept of commerce whose history he traces in his 1995 book, with Bolívar rejecting said paradigm in favor of a vision of the state based on the program of education and morality, as seen in his Angostura Address. Pagden calls upon comparisons of old, though not exactly in the terms used by US-based hemispheric thinkers of the nineteenth century and by Pan American thinkers of the twentieth century, for whom culture was the defining difference, the Anglo-American cultural tradition placed in contrast to the Spanish-Latin American. Departing from these categories, Pagden sees Bolívar plainly and simply as embodying old-regime notions of nation and expansion, defending this assertion from the perspective of the classicist paradigm he adopts to produce his history. Speaking from the heights of Greece and Rome, he offers the following genealogy: the English Colonies, under the influence of Washington, fashioned their union on the multistate model of Athens; the Spanish colonies, as evident from the short-lived Gran Colombia of Bolívar, fashioned theirs on the centralist principles of Rome. Whereas the one, furthermore, succeeded in generating the desired federation, this thanks to Washington, the other did not, the reason being that Bolívar failed to imagine, and detail in writing, a federated union based on commerce, a fact, Pagden insists, that proved fatal for a continent that would be unsuccessful economically.11 Never mind the economic interests of local elites in La Paz, Caracas, Lima, and Bogotá, the market forces of the moment, or, furthermore, that Bolívar’s Gran Colombia and his proposed Andean Federation were rejected by his contemporaries, Pagden, in his attempt at promoting economic development in Latin America, is interested in the more dramatic possibility of a Bolívar responsible for an entire continent, a figure who prepared Latin America for a modernity contaminated by Europe’s old regime, having failed to heed the lessons of the classical past.
For her part, Mary Louise Pratt, a US-based academic, similarly presents Bolívar as a foundational figure, but from within the context of the culture wars of the United States in the 1980s and 1990s. Focusing on the story of independence from the perspective of the entrance of new British capitalist interests in Latin America and of the subject positions of workers, non-whites, and women, she gives to her readers a Bolívar who, in opposition to the conservative forces that sought to preside over these subjects, desired to make real the liberal project. In her progressive version of Bolívar that shares certain elements with Lynch’s 1973 iteration of his figure, downplayed, if not removed, from view are Bolívar’s relationships to his generals, his assumption of dictatorial powers, his vision of the United Kingdom, and his connections to race issues, most significantly, his fear of pardocracia . Instead, Pratt presents Bolívar as a figure who stood plainly and simply for liberation, desiring to dominate Nature, not other human beings, the evidence of this being his “My Delirium on the Chimborazo,” an immaculate figure who was entirely of the future but whose life and acts in the end show him the impossibility of creating a modern Latin America.12 For Pratt, Bolívar represents a heroic beginning or possibility that never became more than that, a victim of the elites. For Pagden, in contrast, Bolívar’s purportedly old-regime model was in fact fulfilled. Here are two narratives that tell different stories about Bolívar within opposing ideological frameworks for understanding the actors responsible for economic underdevelopment and social marginalization.
But if a lot is revealed by looking at how Bolívar’s figure is spun in these two cases, either as an old model given new life to or as a new model aborted, our concern—let us consider for a last time—has been to allow the actors who have gone to him to speak, which means understanding their narratives as ones arrived at in particular moments in the context of already established traditions of interpretation of Bolívar’s figure, traditions that we have an obligation to know, as they tell us more than whether Bolívar was a liberal or not. These depictions tell us how historians, intellectuals, writers, and state leaders have gone about making the arguments they have in the social and political spheres they inhabit. This goes for all the figures we have examined in this book, many who have remained under the radar but who precisely through their reflections on Bolívar and their engagement with the pairings of which we have spoken have carried out important functions at both hemispheric and national levels.
Recovering the biographies of these actors, stories available only in the context of the larger examination we have undertaken—what we could call the totality of Bolívar writing and representation to which we have aspired—has also been the aim of this study, then. We have seen the Mexican Guillermo A. Sherwell fleeing the Mexican Revolution to become an important actor in the Pan American Union; the Ecuadorian Juan Montalvo turning to Bolívar to attack García Moreno, with Larrazábal’s 1865 New York City–published epistolary history providing one of the foundations for that verbal assault; the Bolivian writer Lucío Medina taking advantage of the intersection of twentieth-century Bolivarianism in Venezuela and state formation in Bolivia to produce volumes celebrating his figure, this after the work of professional historians of earlier decades; the Peruvian Víctor Andrés Belaúnde going to the United States as a non-Bolívar specialist, then returning to his home country with his John Hopkins University Press volume in hand; Waldo Frank in the post-war period going against the wishes of Rómulo Betancourt and producing an authoritarian Bolívar, while calling upon Bolívar’s statements from the late 1820s to produce racial hierarchies by which to promote a white-defined Latin America, and so on.
Who has spoken most authoritatively about Bolívar is not the question we ask. Rather, we are concerned with different locations of the Bolívar narrative both vis-à-vis itself and the geopolitical world in which it has been put forward. We have, to repeat once more, centered our attention on the actors who have produced those narratives, actors who positioned his figure on the national, hemispheric, and world geopolitical stage to create knowledge on state formation to be consumed by educational institutions, civic and political bodies, and elites. As we have seen, they have performed this function at home, in transit or exile, as well as in the position of émigrés intent on finding a place for themselves in the countries to which they have arrived.
José Martí, Pablo Neruda, and Ángel Rama can be placed in the second category; the Mexican Sherwell, and the German Masur in the third; the Peruvian Belaúnde in all three categories. But in ways complex and perhaps unexpected, these actors have also participated in the construction of already established sites and/or of new ones, their own journeys of displacement and travels themselves productive of new intermediate, inter-state subject positions. In our story, we have also seen how Venezuela and Colombia have been connected at different levels; their historical experiences often imagined against one another. A final example in the story of that relationship concerns Indalecio Liévano Aguirre’s biography, which has gone through multiple editions and reprintings in Colombia, Cuba, Venezuela, and Spain. In the new Venezuelan printing of 1988 requested by then Venezuelan president, Jaime Lusinchi, an update of that of 1971 (a request that included a new edition of the Augusto Mijares’ Venezuelan biography and a new Spanish-language edition of Gerhard Masur’s US American biography) the preface writer, Mario Briceño Perozo, places the work in opposition to that of Germán Arciniegas. Briceño Perozo asserts that Liévano Aguirre was correct in his assessment of Bolívar while his Colombian counterpart was wrong.13 A debate between Colombian historians is being used in the service of the Venezuelan cult. In the end, the story of Bolívar in the Americas is as much that of the intersection of individuals, institutions, and states engaging with his figure in specific moments and periods as it is that of an abiding interest in a major figure. It is one in which Bolívar’s interpreters have become as important as Bolívar himself, the question always being whose narrative are we reading.