In this and the following chapters, we focus on Venezuela’s Bolivarian tradition, called by some a cult. Accounting for it is challenging. To start, the story of Bolívar often reads as if it were coterminous with the Venezuelan republic from its beginning in 1830 through the present. Even the secession movement, led by Venezuelan elites and former Bolivarian general and hero of independence, José Antonio Páez, against Bolívar and his Gran Colombia (1819–1831) can be hard to make out, remaining subordinated to larger narratives rooted in the figure of Bolívar and the independence process. Who has constructed these narratives? The nation’s diverse actors have. They have done so to have a platform for their battles over the political identity of the country. Two dates are of particular importance with regard to those battles: April 19, 1810, when the cabildo (town council) of Caracas declared loyalty to King Fernando VII, sequestered in Bayonne, France, and July 5, 1811, when the Venezuelan Congress proclaimed independence from Spain. As for Venezuela’s constitutional tradition, instability has defined it, with new presidents or political groups declaring constitutions to reflect the political and social order as they conceive it, most recently as seen in the cases of the constitutions of 1961 and 1999. With all the changes, the 1811 constitution, the first Venezuelan Constitution, has continued to be central at a symbolic level. In his Angostura Address, Bolívar himself, who vehemently criticized that constitution but who had before him many of the principal actors from the oligarchy of the defeated First Republic, represented the 1811 constitution as having legal force; the new constitution to be drafted would replace it. In 1830, the Venezuelan Congress represented itself as recuperating the 1811 constitution when it finally formally seceded from the Gran Colombia. In the battles that Venezuelans have waged over their political and social identity, the First Republic, its constitution, and the constitutions that have followed have been at the center of discussion.
To recover these dates and places in their hermeneutical dimension, we locate ourselves in the Venezuelan state founded in 1830, following the actors who have reflected on Bolívar, the different knowledges they have constructed through and around him—liberalism and classicism, positivism, critical humanism, and socialism, with Marxist thought an important element of discourse and counter-discourse from the 1920s forward—and the ways those knowledges are used to define the social and political order in the context of civil war, military insurrection or the threat of it, and the state. Exile in addition to prison and assassination have accompanied that process, with speaking out providing the conditions for all three. Actors either leave the country to find that they cannot return, depart and then return, or exit definitively. Of course, many stay too, seeking to support and build the institutions of Venezuelan society, understanding what it takes to remain. Recently, the economy has become a new cause for exit, with citizens, at large, departing for neighboring countries and for Europe and the United States. Among Venezuela’s exiles, Bolívar heads the list, his remains and figure repatriated; followed by Páez; writer Felipe Larrazábal; banking magnate and caudillo Manuel Antonio Matos; president of the republic and Matos’s nemesis, José Cipriano Castro; writer Rufino Blanco Fombona; still another president of the republic, Rómulo Betancourt; and writer Mariano Picón Salas. The list goes on and on, including prominent communist leaders from the 1920s to the 1960s and scores of individuals from the intelligentsia of these times as well as from the military. To consider this reality, we also focus on what we will call the written Bolívar, examining how actors have used the vast written record as given through Bolívar’s voluminous writings, the edited collections that mediate those writings, and previous interpreters of his figure to make truth claims about who he was and what he stood for and to construct their own intellectual practices. Venezuela’s Bolivarian tradition has a long history, serving as the stage for the country’s struggle over liberalism and authoritarianism, with repercussions throughout the Americas from the nineteenth century through Hugo Chávez.
To begin our story, we need to work backward and forward from Venezuela’s watershed moment in the nineteenth century, the devastating civil war of 1859–1863 between the Conservative and Liberal Parties, known as the Guerra Federal or the Guerra Larga (Federal or Long War), and the key moment that Venezuelan actors look to as they narrate their history. The war was won by Liberals with more than 100,000 dead, bringing to an end what some came to call in hindsight, “Venezuela’s Golden Era,” 1831–1858, a period of relative economic growth and political stability with planters having access to credit in order to transform the cacao estates of the late 1700s into coffee estates.1
Controlling the politics of that era were José Antonio Páez—who, when not president himself (1830–1835 and 1839–1843), was kingmaker—and former Bolivarian general, José Tadeo Monagas. Monagas, whom Páez entrusted to carry the mantle of the Conservative Party, having counted on him previously to support his positions, took up the Liberal Party cause soon after his election to president by the Conservative-dominated Congress in 1847. Together with his brother José Gregorio, he held power from 1847 to 1858.
Bolívar was an integral symbolic presence in the period, a phenomenon best explained by historian Carrera Damas in the book already spoken of, his 1969 El culto a Bolívar (The Cult of Bolívar). Carrera Damas shows that the same elite sector that under the leadership of Páez expelled Bolívar quickly appropriated his figure from the Bolívar-admiring masses, precisely to govern those masses. By doing so, they legitimized themselves before one another with the result that Bolívar tropes became ubiquitous across the political spectrum.2
Páez , himself, participated using Bolívar in the early 1830s to seek to legitimize executive authority, and in his second term in office, by complying with Liberal demands to bring Bolívar’s remains back from Santa Marta, New Granada (today Colombia). But Carrera Damas , with the new genealogy he proposes—one tracing Venezuela’s twentieth-century cultural and political devotion to his figure back to the beginning of the republic—was hardly the first to offer an interpretation of these important years that a few decades prior to his writing, as we shall see in the next chapter, had been the object of systematic periodization for the purpose of creating histories for the state. In the 1950s, Venezuelan intellectual Mariano Picón Salas, whom we shall address in Chap. 8, speaks positively. Critical of his own decade, which saw the military leader Marcos Pérez Jiménez in power and Pérez Jiménez’s civilian nemesis Rómulo Betancourt in exile, he celebrates mid-nineteenth-century actors such as politician and minister Fermín Toro and writer Juan Vicente González, figures who, true to their moral principles, faced down authoritarian power in ways that his generation had not been able to do.3
To reinvigorate political action in the 1950s, Picón Salas could have called upon many figures who exercised free speech at their own peril during the period of 1831–1863 and beyond. One such figure is Antonio Leocadio Guzmán, who founded the Liberal Party in 1840, famously using the press to incite the provinces against the Conservative president Carlos Soublette. Soublette imprisoned him in 1846 with the death penalty imposed as punishment for his free-speech misdeeds but his life would be spared a year later when fellow Liberal, José Tadeo Monagas, became president. Another figure he could have called upon is Felipe Larrazábal, a politician, lawyer, journalist, and composer. Larrazábal was part of Venezuela’s Liberal machine, working to enact the legislative agenda of the Monagas brothers.
The brothers, no less authoritarian than Conservative leaders Páez and Soublette, managed power not only by alternating in the executive office, but also by extending their nepotistic pact through the appointments they made. One major political act they are remembered for is their attack on the Congress in 1848, which came after José Tadeo was accused of misusing public funds, operating the government outside of Caracas, and using the armed forces without approval from the Government Council. With three deputies killed, many Conservatives left, though Conservative senator, Fermín Toro refused to be intimidated. Páez rose up only to be defeated twice and then sent into exile. During his second term, José Tadeo Monagas established two new constitutions, one in 1857 and another in 1858. With the second, he instituted universal suffrage, ended the death penalty, abolished slavery, established freedom of the press, and extended the term limit of the executive from four to six years. Conservatives and others had had enough, unwilling to accept what in their view was a personal family dynasty with a congress filled with Liberals that had voted him president a second time despite there being a growing sense of economic crisis. When one of his trusted generals, Julián Castro, rose up to remove him from office in 1858, Monagas did not seek to hold on to power, going into exile. The overthrow, which was the only successful one up to that point and which was denounced by the United States, marked the beginning of the civil war, setting in motion the response of new progressive Liberal leaders who sought to regain the presidency.
They were Ezequiel Zamora, killed in 1860, and Juan Crisóstomo Falcón, the latter who would go on to be president in the war’s aftermath. As historians have written, many were the factors that came together to create the conditions for what became a bloodbath. Not only were there vendettas to be paid among Conservatives and Liberals, economic depression had left thousands without work, and former slaves, though free for decades, were forced to return to the estates to which they had been yoked. In the absence of the old social consensus, punctuated by military uprisings and repressions, and built upon the hegemony of the oligarchy, the popular classes were suddenly on the national stage, available to form part of the small militias assembled by both Liberals and Conservatives, with criticism of the country’s wealthy, the most prominent of these, independence generals Páez and Soublette, providing the ideological grist for action and reaction.
We take up the story with Larrazábal, who provides a bridge between the pre- and post-civil war and who established one of the foundations for Venezuela’s Bolivarian tradition, the individual to whom future interpreters responded, representing over time by virtue of the importance his text acquired the beginning of a logic of cultural production. Larrazábal, with the end of the Guerra Federal and the country’s coffee economy in shatters, wasted no time, seeking to establish a new beginning for Venezuela by bringing out in 1865 a work that he had begun to write in the 1850s and through which he hoped to set a course for the future, one defined by constitutionalism and classicism.4 This was La vida y correspondencia general del libertador Simón Bolívar (The Life and General Correspondence of the Liberator Simón Bolívar),5 published at the Eduardo O. Jenkins Press in New York City, a Spanish-language publishing house that had long been putting into print the works of Latin American statesmen and authors. In its two tomes, which would see multiple printings not only at the Eduardo O. Jenkins Press, but also at other New York City presses starting as soon as 1866 and extending through the 1870s and 1880s with an English language edition also in 1866 and a combined volume edition in 1887 at D. Appleton y Compañia,6 Larrazábal defends and celebrates Bolívar’s life in the impressive narrative he writes, incorporating for analysis and documentary evidence several of his texts, both public and private, and letters from other actors from the times. Larrazábal explains to readers that Bolívar’s works represent a wonder that parallels archeological discoveries achieved by states in Europe in the nineteenth century, a past unearthed, so to speak, symbolizing a distinguished legacy for both Venezuela and Latin America, even a step forward for civilization.7
Through the volumes, Larrazábal sought to clean up the text production about Bolívar from the times of independence through the present. He responds to criticisms of Bolívar that circulated in the Americas, in Europe, and in Spain, criticisms that include the Spanish essayist Joseph Blanco White’s derogatory remarks about Bolívar’s parading of the urns containing the remains of fallen soldiers and those spread by one of Bolívar’s most inveterate enemies, the Venezuelan royalist, José Domingo Díaz, who published Recuerdos sobre la rebelión de Caracas (Memories of the Caracas Rebellion) in Madrid in 1829. Díaz describes Bolívar as violent,8 with Bolívar’s War to the Death proclamation in Trujillo, Venezuela on June 15, 1813, and other acts serving as evidence for that characterization. Indeed, if there was one element that Larrazábal was responding to, it was precisely this, discourse having to do with Bolívar’s War to the Death. On the subject of Bolívar’s execution of Manuel Píar on October 16, 1817, he both celebrates Píar as a great military hero and defends Bolívar, telling of how he establishes immediately a “Republic … governed according to the foundations of modern politics, whose major principles are the division and the equilibrium between the branches of government.”9 Most importantly, Larrazábal constructs a narrative that defends Venezuela’s war with the Spanish, telling of Spanish military leaders in the Americas who did not dialogue with the First Republic and of a foolish king who turned against constitutional monarchy. He also attacks the Bourbons, speaking of the House of Austria, which demanded the release of Fernando VII. Spain together with Napoleon is farcical.
Classicism appears on two levels. On the one hand, Larrazábal brings Bolívar forth in relationship to the Hellenic and Roman world of knowledge production that for centuries dominated academic and elite discourse in Europe and parts of the Spanish colonies and which Bolívar came to master through his own readings. On the other hand, Larrazábal uses classicism as a hermeneutic space in which to place Bolívar’s life and career, including the Gran Colombia—which Bolívar conceived and over which he presided between 1819 and 1830, though in absentia from 1822 to 1826. He is the civilizer who through his knowledge of the art of persuasion and his command of the Greco-Roman tradition, both of which are in ample evidence throughout his writings, brings order, enlightenment, and peace to his worlds. In doing all this, Larrazábal defends both Bolívar and his state, speculating that had Bolívar—whom he portrays as a kind, generous, and democratic spirit—not campaigned against himself in the months from February to May of 1830, which he alleges he did, he would have been elected president. Physically weakened, Bolívar made a mistake, so Larrazábal’s argument continues. Called a tyrant on account of his 1828–1830 dictatorship, Bolívar became concerned about his reputation when he should not have. Larrazábal’s speculation does not end there. Larrazábal asserts that had Bolívar continued as president, the Gran Colombia would not have collapsed and the civil wars in the decades ahead that visited both the south and center of its vast territory when reduced to individual republics would have been avoided.10
But as for who Bolívar is, in the end, classical authorities hold the day. We are told that had he been a contemporary of Cicero, the Roman leader, orator, and lawyer, Cicero would have described Bolívar as deserving of a place in the mansion of the just.11 We are also told of the words of the Roman general and statesman, Sulla, who speaks of how common it is for leaders to be mistreated by the peoples they serve after they have left power.12 Bolívar is in good company, then, but he is not insensitive to the ingratitude of those he served, in the final scene portrayed as dying not of a physical ailment but rather, as Larrazábal states, of a broken heart, profoundly wounded in his sensitivity by the “cruel ostracism decreed by the Congress of Venezuela,” his friends unable to console him sufficiently.13
An ideal mostly for Left-leaning nation construction in Latin America in the twentieth century, as we saw in the case of Galeano, but also for visions from the Right, the Gran Colombia in the nineteenth was the symbolic bastion of Venezuela’s Liberal Party, existing as a model to recuperate in a nation founded on its rejection. In the early 1830s, José Tadeo Monagas moved to resurrect the Gran Colombia as a confederation that would include his estado de oriente (eastern state) made up of the provinces of Cumaná, Margarita, and Guayana, in this way contesting Páez’s new state.14 In the early 1840s, Monagas and Antonio Leocadio Guzmán spoke of reconstituting the Gran Colombia as a confederation of Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador, at the same time they called for the return of Bolívar’s body.15 In the 1850s, in the moment of his second presidency, Monagas sought to establish a Gran Colombia confederation through an act of congress.16 And at the turn of the twentieth century, in a context defined by both Colombia and Venezuela, Venezuelan president Cipriano Castro endeavored to revive it, more serious about this, perhaps, than his predecessors, sending money to Colombia, where he had once lived, to support that country’s Liberal Party against the dominant Conservative Party in what would be known as the War of a Thousand Days (1899–1902).17 As for Larrazábal, he was operating, then, within a defined tradition, offering to the Venezuelan nation a Bolívar who adhered to republican classical values and who throughout his military career stood against violence in contrast to Spanish generals who were bloodthirsty, from Monteverde to Morillo, the execution in 1817 of Policarpa Salavarrieta (a seamstress who spied for the New Granadan forces of resistance) in Bogotá at the hands of the general Pablo Morillo serving as one of his prime examples.18 Calling on a multitude of genealogical tropes from the classical world, Europe, and the United States, he tells us that Bolívar is like Cincinnatus, the Roman statesman and military leader; Charlemagne, the leader of the Franks who in the late 700s and early 800s was the first to unite Western Europe after the fall of the Roman era, creating the conditions for the new Latin-based national entities that would arise; George Washington, the general who defeated the British to establish the US republic; and among other writers and orators the Roman, Cicero. In short, Bolívar is a great military leader, a wise and virtuous political force who knows how to take and pursue counsel, particularly with regard to ceding power to civilian authority and congresses at each stage of his military career, and is also a figure adept at using the written and spoken word. Simplification in the name of hero construction is the order of the day, as there is little acknowledgment of the figure who, in fact, governed the Gran Colombia during Bolívar’s absence in the south, Francisco de Paula Santander; of the provisional dictatorship Bolívar established in August of 1828 after failing to come to terms with Santander at the Constitutional Congress two months earlier, in June; or of the assassination attempt on his life by Liberal opponents associated with Santander and their summary execution afterwards except to say that Bolívar, in the face of dissension, lost his nerve when he should not have. In the message promoted, Bolívar symbolizes plainly and simply leadership, order, peace, and unanimity.
Bolívar’s writings, described, as we have said, as equivalent to the archeological finds of nineteenth-century Europe, are at the center of Larrazábal’s reflection. He deploys them in multiple ways to carry forth his vision, many in function of the binary of the private and the public, and most having to do with the matter of the sentimental Bolívar he is seeking to construct, broken heart and all. In one instance of his instrumentalization of the letters, he assigns special importance to the concept of friendship, as we have seen with the friends who are not able to console Bolívar. Surveying the letters, Larrazábal cites moments in which Bolívar refers to and speaks of friendship and others in which he himself can be seen to be acting as a friend. In another instance, related to the idea of friendship, he argues that Bolívar is compassionate, even tender—the word “tender” lacing the pages of the two volumes—as he reviews with the careful eye of a lawyer the most important incidents in Bolívar’s campaigns and political career where he has been portrayed as acting only violently and presents evidence to the contrary. This is how Larrazábal handles the June 15, 1813, Decree of War to the Death. Presenting the decree as the result of a lack of judgment on the part of Bolívar, Larrazábal goes on to find evidence of acts of clemency with regard to Bolívar’s application of it and with regard to his general conduct during the years of 1813–1815. For example, in connection to Bolívar’s siege of Cartagena’s fort in 1815, his last act before he departs the mainland, he tells of Bolívar’s efforts to bring about a peaceful resolution with the commander of the fort from which Bolívar has been tasked with extracting weaponry for the assault on Santa Marta. This is Manuel del Castillo who forms part of an independence group that is not aligned with Bogotá and who, furthermore, despises Bolívar. Not only does Bolívar write him—we are told—one intimate letter, as Larrazábal puts it, but he continues to send letters pleading his case, while, at the same time, ignoring the fact that those letters are going unanswered and that, more importantly, Castillo has repeatedly insulted him in the incipient press with the notices he is placing.19 In what has all the characteristics of a sentimental novel, we see Bolívar turn the other cheek.
In regard to Bolívar-the-letter-writer in relation to the concept of sentiment, the author could not have been more a creature of print culture, as might advise Walter Ong. In his book Orality and Literacy, Ong describes print culture as opposed to manuscript culture as a technology of sorts that, building on the classical and Judeo-Christian traditions with the novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a culmination, makes possible the idea of the individual as a subject endowed with interiority.20
Larrazábal promises interiority. Placing Bolívar’s writings in the context of Venezuela’s literary world, Larrazábal presents Bolívar as offering the promise of cultivation to the individual who peruses his writings, certain to learn much from what Bolívar wrote and placed in the press. We imagine an entire circuit of production and consumption. Bolívar is given to us as an author, or producer, while his texts are made to appear as so many pieces to be devoured by subjects formally defined as readers. As for the act of reading, it is also spoken of, presented as providing moral improvement, the inner life of the individual enriched by intimate contact with the mind and spirit of the writer. Reading publics existed differently across Europe and the Americas in the nineteenth century, some, obviously, stronger than others, and all located in different traditions; but they constituted a shared object of reflection for writers, historians, and philosophers who saw in their expansion and refinement a path to modernity. To Venezuela Larrazábal was offering Bolívar as nothing less than the foundation of a national tradition: “My readers will find in the correspondence that is being printed a copious and inexhaustible storehouse of timely reflections: of thoughts full of vitality and wisdom, of valuable documents of moral and political experience and teaching, with which men can educate themselves for public life.”21 Settle back and read Bolívar as one might read Plutarch or Tacitus, he was advising.
In addition to aestheticizing his letters in this way—the foundation of a humanistic tradition centered not only in classicism, but also in sentiment, and in particular, the interpersonal act between writer and recipient—Larrazábal uses them to establish Bolívar’s credentials as a thinker of liberalism, charging them with serving as the portal to the rich inner world of the author, to the truth, in particular, of the identity of Bolívar-the-nineteenth-century man. Here were historical documents through which, when properly seen, can be established the essential figure above and beyond the claims of his detractors. It is not just that Bolívar was devoutly republican, calling four constitutional congresses, three during the period of the Gran Colombia, and that he was averse to occupying positions of power, Larrazábal repeats throughout his narrative; Bolívar was also committed more broadly to the democratic and rational ideals of the age, including, most significantly, abolition, made law in Venezuela in 1854 under the presidency of José Gregorio Monagas and proclaimed in the United States in 1863 with Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. To position Bolívar in relation to abolition, so important to the agenda of the Liberal Party of the Monagas brothers who presided over Venezuela from 1847 to 1858 as presidents, Larrazábal furnishes us with letters of Alexandre Pétion, the president of Haiti who lent him crucial assistance in 1816. This support, without which it is not clear that independence would have been achieved in the time frame in which it was, came with a request for a pledge from Bolívar to end slavery subsequent to independence.22
Two of the letters of Pétion are to Brigade General Ignace Despontreaux Marion, instructing him to furnish Bolívar with military equipment and supplies; Larrazábal includes them as evidence of Pétion’s definitive assistance. Another is to Bolívar making the actual request. As for Bolívar’s response, we are not furnished with a letter, instead via spoken words relayed by Larrazábal. Larrazábal has Bolívar state that he would have freed the slaves independently of the request from Pétion. Despite the complexity of Bolívar’s relationship to Afro-Venezuela, beginning with his defense in the Jamaica Letter of the rights and privileges of the creole class, descended from the conquistadors, and his stance subsequent to his 1819 Angostura Address against pardo autonomy on the northern coast of the Gran Colombia, he is affirming Bolívar’s credentials on the matter of manumission. Bolívar created an institutional structure for manumission, establishing for the Gran Colombia the manumission office. But manumission was, as historian John Lombardi has argued, a process that had a logic of its own, existing independently of Bolívar just as it did of other actors who at different times claimed to be the agents of emancipation in Venezuela. Lombardi tells us what is now well known because of his own work and that of others, that in the early moments of the independence movement black slaves were given freedom in exchange for participating in the militias, first of the royalists, then of the independentists. The context for his reflection on emancipation is Lombardi’s polemic with the Venezuelan Conservative and Liberal Parties of mid century. By the time of the 1850s, when Liberals were concerned about Conservative revolutionaries, and also the possibility of the Conservative Party taking from them the political issue of abolition, the elimination of slavery was just about a fait accompli. In reality, neither party, he insists, could possibly have considered defending slavery when 97% of the black population was free, with children of black women long being born as such and landowners who used slave labor long being compensated by a state-funded manumission group, imperfect and troubling though that group was. In the end, Lombardi tells us, Monagas was unconcerned about the few remaining slave owners, desirous of being known as the leader who brought about abolition while not ceding the issue to Conservatives.23
Behind the public, but private world Larrazábal carefully chisels out for his readers—the foundation of his civilized, emotion-creating Bolívar, of his imagined reading public, and also of his various constructions of Bolívar as world leader—is a master text, entirely public in nature from which the author’s inner, essential Bolívar, the figure defined by his personal letters, is constructed. That text around which Bolívar’s letters are assembled—the unacknowledged model for the author’s tome—is the February 15, 1819, Angostura Address, gently positioned by Larrazábal as Bolívar’s definitive public work. In this address, Bolívar, having consolidated his power for a second time after failing to hold on to Caracas in 1814 and after receiving essential support from Pétion twice, enumerates for his audience of soldiers and patrician military leaders the acts that must be instituted once independence is achieved. These include emancipating African-descended slaves, whom he describes as “children of Venezuela,” uniting Venezuela and New Granada into one state, and compensating soldiers of his newly constituted armies in a manner befitting fathers of the nation, a status he promises will be theirs after independence is won, but one that, as we are told by John Lynch, never came to pass. Caudillos like Páez refused to distribute lands from the Commission of Sequestered Property to them.24 In the address, Bolívar also famously outlines the kind of government that he believes would be most appropriate for a population that is emerging from the colonial experience. The governmental structure of which he speaks is British in inspiration, having the equivalent of a House of Commons and a House of Lords, is not unlike that of the United States, having, in addition to a judiciary, an executive, and is informed by the Athenian institution of the Areopagus and the Roman censors, having a fourth branch tasked with presiding over education and morality and charged at the moment of the initiation of the republic with the one-time responsibility of selecting a cohort of senators for the legislature, there being no clearly constituted aristocratic social class from which the representatives of property could be taken. Finally, Bolívar proposes, most importantly, a new conception of Latin American identity, presenting Latin Americans as a blend of skin colors based on the mixing of African, European, and indigenous peoples, a radical shift from what he proposes in the Jamaica Letter of 1815, where, as we have said above, he fashions himself as a leader of a revolutionary movement representing white creole political and economic interests and prerogatives rooted in contract theory dating back to the promises by Carlos V to the conquerors.
If Larrazábal goes to Bolívar’s writings and to independence to create a common way of feeling with Bolívar positioned as author, civilizer, and precursor of abolition—a figure that in the wake of the Federal War could create a bond to unite Venezuelans as citizens without saying no to political parties—Antonio Guzmán Blanco, son of the founder of the Liberal Party and former secretary to Liberal military leader and then caudillo president, Juan Crisóstomo Falcón, would also see value in them.
During the period of his rule over Venezuela from 1870 to 1888, Guzmán Blanco fashioned Bolívar’s figure into the symbol of his modern Venezuela. The 1864 constitution that came out of the Federal War elevated the historic provinces to self-governing states, leaving the central government in Caracas weak. The country was now called the United States of Venezuela. Guzmán Blanco recognized the authority of that constitution, but he amended it in 1874 with a new constitution, shortening the presidential term to two years and then again more significantly with another new constitution in 1881, this time reducing the number of states from 20 to 9 and creating a General Council to elect the president. The states remained sovereign within the Venezuelan nation, but he used his army to march on different regions of the country to discourage military uprisings.Guzmán Blanco increased his hold through this measure and his reduction of the number of states. Also significant was his influence over the generals who did his bidding during his 19-year rule and who served as president to create the signs of constitutionalism; and his modernization of the country, including, most importantly, Caracas.
Regarded as Venezuela’s first modernizer, his many supporters from the time seeing him as an enlightened or benevolent despot and calling him the illustrious American, Guzmán Blanco completed the first span of El Ferrocarril Bolívar (The Bolívar Railroad) in 1877, which opened up commercial possibilities, particularly for Venezuelan copper; significantly increased the number of primary schools, mandating education; built the Federal Legislative Palace of Venezuela (the capitol city); established a national treasury; created a national theater and national academy of language; and sought to professionalize the military while reducing the number of generals who had grown exponentially during the Guerra Federal. Military uprisings, as we have said, continued to be a concern, as did the intellectuals who openly critiqued him including Nicanor Bolet Peraza, director of the Tribuna Liberal (The Liberal Tribune). Military uprisings undertaken to change the executive had to be treated with seriousness. Guzmán Blanco, let us remember, had led one. It was a tradition: Monagas in the 1830s; Páez in the late 1840s; and the caudillo leaders of his time who sought to unseat him and those who followed in the 1890s such as General Joaquín Crespo, who occupied the presidency in the 1880s under Guzmán Blanco and seized it in the 1892 civil war, holding it until 1898. Guzmán Blanco’s response was not only to undertake to subordinate the military to civilian authority, but also to exile former and current foes, whether military or political as his predecessors had, and when not this, to imprison or execute them. Bolet Peraza, for instance, had to leave the country in 1880. Importantly, for our narrative, soon after taking Caracas in 1870, having himself been in exile in Curazao after the fall of Crisóstomo Falcón’s government and the brief return of José Tadeo Monagas to power in 1868, he exiled Larrazábal. Larrazábal had been an ally of his in the Guerra Federal, but the writer was now attacking him in the press for murdering a general.25
This was not all. The year before, in 1870, Larrazábal wrote a public letter to Guzmán Blanco’s father, reminding him of all that they had fought for in their battle with the Conservatives.26 Those values—law and order and peaceful elections—imperfectly embodied though they were by the Monagas brothers , had been laid waste to by his son when he marched on Caracas that year. With this, Larrazábal had quickly become a threat, not only for his direct attacks on the dictator who later would have himself declared constitutional president, but also for the reason that here was a Liberal who refused to give up the ideals of freedom of speech and orderly and peaceful elections. But if exiles could return, as Páez did in 1858 when the new government lifted the order of exile issued in 1850 by José Tadeo Monagas and as he himself did when he took Caracas by force, Guzmán Blanco would not have to be concerned about Larrazábal. He died in 1773 in a shipwreck off the coast of France, en route there to publish his voluminous papers, including myriad copies of Bolívar’s letters.
Going as far back as the late 1860s, Guzmán Blanco had desired to remake the public space of the state. In 1872, he removed the arcades that had surrounded the site of Plaza Bolívar since colonial times. They had been used for executions. In 1874, four years into his rule, he had an equestrian statue of Bolívar erected in Plaza Bolívar, the central plaza that had received his name in 1842 in the moment his remains were returned to Caracas. Locals continued to refer to it as Plaza de Armas (Arms Square) or Plaza del Mercado (Market Square). France provided the model for Guzmán Blanco’s remodeling of the plaza and for the public architecture he brought to the state.27 Back from Paris in 1878 after a stint with one of his generals in the presidency, the Francophile Guzmán Blanco took the executive position a second time, putting down insurrections. With a new commitment to using Bolívar’s figure, he exploited it for the major symbolic spaces of the state. His desire in part was to strip the Bolivarian tradition inherited from his father of its republican bite, and cast aside its seductive vision of return to a utopic moment of executive power, through recovery of Bolívar’s rejected person and the Gran Colombia. He had learned much from the way dates, plazas, statues, and buildings are used in France to celebrate the country’s heroes and to create a sense of national cohesion. Wasting no time, Guzmán Blanco renamed the national currency in 1879 from the venezolano to the bolívar ; established in 1880 La Orden del Libertador (Order of the Liberator) to recognize Venezuelans who make important contributions to the nation, a continuation of the La Orden de Los Libertadores (Order of the Liberators) established by Bolívar in 1813; created a national holiday to commemorate Bolívar’s birth; and had a National Pantheon built in 1883. For Bolívar’s birthday celebration in 1883, he invited representatives from Latin American countries. For the site of the pantheon, he chose that of a colonial church still in ruins from the 1812 earthquake that was located in the center of Caracas, La Ermita de la Santísima Trinidad (The Hermitage of the Most Saintly Trinity). The pantheon was a secular institution, but he rebuilt the church to house it, thereby taking advantage of religion to produce the effect of spirituality for a Catholic public, while continuing to undermine the institution of the Catholic church from which, in the early 1870s, he had taken land. Along both the left and right naves, he placed monuments memorializing Venezuelan heroes. But he gave the place of highest distinction to Bolívar, positioning on the altar an empty sarcophagus to stand for his tomb. Was this sacrilege? In later years, to boost his popularity before a public that identified with Bolívar, he transferred to it the Liberator’s remains, held in the Caracas Cathedral in the Bolívar family mausoleum since the time of their repatriation from Santa Marta in 1842. Guzmán Blanco also had statues of himself erected in Caracas, which would be taken down as soon as he left office, the vast wealth he accumulated protested by students.
The currency is of great interest. Performing the name change at the beginning of his second term in the executive, having secured new loans for Venezuela during his time in Europe, he did something few leaders have thought to do: use a “founding father” not just to visually consecrate the bills and coins of a currency, but also, and most significantly, to define the currency itself. As for the ideological payoff he hoped to achieve, he could not have been more ambitious: externally, on the world market, the prestige of Bolívar’s name would lend credibility to Venezuela; internally, the intimate association of Bolívar’s figure with the instrument used by the masses to fulfill their material needs and desires would encourage identification with the state.
Guzmán Blanco not only created dates but also repurposed them. One major date redefined was, as historian Carole Leal Curiel explains, Venezuela’s April 19, 1810, the day on which Venezuela’s junta pledged allegiance to Fernando VII and which the new republic had made a Catholic holiday. During the Guzmán Blanco period, it was recast in Bolivarian terms and reimagined as the beginning of an 1810 Liberal revolution with Bolívar as leader, the facts of the junta completely erased from view, and over time so institutionalized as such that a Venezuelan historian in 1960 presented the date as representing “our emancipation.”28 Guzmán Blanco had now placed Bolívar at the “beginning” of the Venezuelan republic, no longer the figure exiled whose ideals were available to be recuperated, but now a leader perfectly aligned with the state and digestible in a new way by the Venezuelan and world public. The Catholic Church, whose authority he was diminishing, could not, and did not, protest.
In addition to this sleight of hand, which would have major consequences for Venezuelan politics as well as for the Latin American hemispheric tradition, which now had a Bolivarian Venezuelan 1810 deployable for distinct purposes, Guzmán Blanco eyed the United States, just as Larrazábal had, seeking to draw political capital for Caracas and himself from the act of erecting a statue in honor of the US hero of independence and first president, George Washington. This was all part of his reinstrumentalization of the period of independence in the year of the celebration of Bolívar’s birthday. Washington and Bolívar were now equivalent, both fathers of their respective nations. In the moment of the dedication, he thanked the United States for its recognition of Venezuela (President James Monroe in fact recognized the Gran Colombia as Venezuela did not exist as a state). There was much symbolic value gained. A Bolívar who represented 1810 and the Liberal Revolution modeled on Washington could encourage traders in the North Atlantic to regard Caracas as a capital in the way they regarded that of the United States. It could also encourage them and others to consider Venezuela a country freed of the logic of civil wars. Guzmán Blanco had made Bolívar into a leader who like Washington rose above political parties to stabilize the nation. But Bolívar was hardly Washington, participating in the hard-nosed politics of his moment and only able to govern by granting Páez authority over Venezuela on January 1, 1827, with himself declaring a dictatorship in the Gran Colombia’s capital, Bogotá, in 1828.
Still, as many things as Guzmán Blanco transformed into Bolivarian emblems, he did not turn everything connected to the Bolívar legacy into a symbol or measure designed to expand the reach and authority of the state. Some elements, such as the urban home the Bolívar family occupied until 1792, which he purchased from the Madriz family in 1876 and rented out to distinguished foreign merchants, remained in his hands alone. Finally, in what would be perhaps his most important act for the purpose of making Bolívar available to Venezuela’s intellectuals of future decades, he ordered the publication of the Bolívar documents collected by Daniel Florencio O’Leary, the Irish adventurer who became Bolívar’s most loyal aide-de-camp and who was promoted to the rank of general in 1830.
The story of O’Leary’s 32-volume collection of Bolívar’s correspondence, his political writings, and his own Memorias, a major source for scholarship on Bolívar and the period of independence, is one of an afterlife in the making. Bolívar, in the moment his health was failing, asked O’Leary to write his biography, and to burn his letters. Implicit in that request, that his life be represented in print, was that O’Leary would defend him against his detractors, particularly against those bent on portraying him as a dictator on the order of Napoleon. O’Leary composed Bolívar’s Memorias, but he hardly honored Bolívar’s request to destroy the papers, doing just the opposite. In exile in Jamaica in 1830, the year of Bolívar’s political decline and death, and after his clash in the 1829 battle of El Santuario,29 he set out on a mission to collect them. It was a vast undertaking. From Bolívar’s interlocutors, O’Leary obtained original copies, including ones from former nemeses such as Spanish General Pablo Morillo, figures whom he had occasion to meet in his capacity as secretary to former Venezuelan generals Carlos Soublette and Mariano Montilla in their European missions in the 1830s and 1840s. As for the biography, O’Leary qualified the Memorias as an “eyewitness account,” using the authority of the rhetorical position of the witness to portray Bolívar as an internationally minded Enlightenment figure who never veered from constitutional process. O’Leary would not be the one to bring out the collection of documents, however, dying in 1854 and leaving his son, whom he had named for the Liberator, Simón B. O’Leary, with the task of completing the massive editorial project.
Simón B. fulfilled the mission but not until years later, at the time of Guzmán Blanco’s authorization for the correspondence, political writings, and Memorias to be put into print. The volumes came out between 1879 and 1888 under the direction of a government-financed editorial staff, with Guzmán Blanco’s name plastered on the title page of each of the 32 volumes, 3 containing the Memorias. After publication, in 1888, they were incorporated on the instructions of President Juan Pablo Rojas Paúl into the Archivo del Libertador established by the National Academy of History.
The battle over Bolívar’s letters and documents was in full gear. Larrazábal had incorporated into his history copies of his own—a fraction of the thousands he had been collecting since his youth and intended to publish in Paris—to make Bolívar available to the Venezuelan and international public as a figure signifying nineteenth-century liberalism in the framework of classicism and his excoriation of the Spanish. He had done this in competition with other letter collectors who were defining a new genre—the publication of individual Bolívar letters serving as an opportunity to use the leader’s own voice to define him and independence—and, more generally, in competition with other Venezuelan public figures, the same ones of whom Carrera Damas speaks that also included Larrazábal himself, and who drew upon the private collections to which they had access.
With the publication of the O’Leary volumes, all this hardly changed. To the contrary, it reinforced this tradition, serving to elevate the act of quoting, collecting, editing, and commenting upon Bolívar’s writings as so many Venezuelan prerogatives for engagement in the public sphere while creating the possibility for a form of national history based on one figure, there being a seemingly inexhaustible archive from which one could draw to define the boundaries of a profession and a tradition. This is the world that Hugo Chávez inherited when, in 2007, he asserted that Bolívar did not die of tuberculosis but was assassinated in his prime by the elites who saw their local capitalist interests threatened by him and his state, offering as material proof of this one of Bolívar’s final letters. That letter was penned by Bolívar to his closest of allies, General Rafael Urdaneta and José María Vergara, on September 25, 1830, just three weeks after Urdaneta’s coup of September 4, 1830. How, so went Chávez’s reasoning, could Bolívar have been ill if at this late date in 1830 he was capable, as Bolívar said he was at the end of the letter, of returning to the fold, never mind of penning the letter itself? Chávez, who would bring out his own collection of Bolívar letters at the London publishing house Verso Books, was harnessing Bolívar’s writings to support his thesis of a healthy body misrepresented by the oligarchic nation as tubercular.30