Whither, Spanish America?
I recently wrote about the King of Spain’s apparent refusal to stand at attention before the sword of Spanish America’s independence ‘hero,’ Simon Bolivar, during the inauguration of Colombian President Gustavo Petro. The uproar around this supposed slight highlighted the attachment elements of the Spanish-speaking world towards this 19th century rebel leader.
In this context, it may be worth interrogating the revolutionary’s legacy. Bolivar has long served as a rallying cry on the continent (indeed, Bolivia is named after the man), but, recently, it is the Left that has succeeded in thoroughly appropriating him. The meaning of Bolivarianismo—allegiance to the legacy of Bolivar—depends on what aspect of the revolutionary’s career is being emphasized. With the politics represented by the late Hugo Chavez, or by the Cuban revolution, acquiescing to the more ‘woke’ ideological coordinates of Petro or Chilean President Gabriel Boric, the degree to which we accept their claim to Bolivar depends not only on whether we see a path of coherence between his liberalism and Marxism. Rather, to consider Bolivar an ideological ancestor of modern ‘woke’ policies we must see liberalism’s ‘negative freedom’ as requiring an expansive state (with its biomedical complex), able to allow the atomized individual as wide a breadth to self-determine as possible (from facilitating abortion to ‘gender reassignment’). Even here, however, it would have to be established that such individual self-determination was, indeed, a pillar of Bolivar’s liberal ideas.
On the contrary, over his lifetime, the vector of Bolivar’s thinking was not towards political radicalism, with its faith in revolutionary violence, but away from it.
My own position is that political modernity (and 18th/19th century revolutionary ideas) can be magnetized to a different center from that of liberalism’s spurious anthropology, with the latter’s understanding of the individual as a ‘rational,’ interest-maximizer, where virtue, human flourishing, and the public good are all reducible to that individual’s calculations. Liberal republicanism can constitute the context in which older, organic imperatives are articulated, as was the case of General Garibaldi’s project, rooted as it was in Cola di Rienzo, Theodoric the Great, and Italian administrative unity during the Roman empire. In the American context, we may place the 1780 Andean rebellion of Tupac Amaru II in this category, uniting as it did the threads of social reform (for the peasant and merchant classes), native American identity (specifically political, Incan identity), and an intelligent ambivalence towards the European legacy (never quite rejecting King Charles III of Spain). Its leader was also a professing Catholic rather than a secularizer.
In the case of Bolivar, however, things are more inchoate. His movement began as a criollo (Spanish-descended) revolt by the privileged sons of the empire, who, nonetheless, apparently rejected the legacy of that empire in toto. Bolivar himself hurled occasional invectives against the indigenous population while also swearing “by the ashes of the great Atahualpa” (last of the Incan emperors). The latter, we should admit, provides enough of a precedent for indigenista socialists of the Hugo Chavez variety to claim Bolivar’s sword as their own, and his movement as mestizo.
Today, whatever place we assign to Bolivar within its history, Latin (or Hispano-)American identity is out of joint, partly on account of his legacy. The revolutionary and his heirs might have chosen to defend part of the imperial past, even while rejecting its later phases. But by failing to do so, the reality of Latin America, including its ethnic composition, came to be viewed as pure calamity in need of near eschatological redemption (cum revolutionary politics).
Consider alternative accounts of Latin American identity. With Tupac Amaru II, we have the idea of a revived, but Christian, Inca state that theoretically admits integration within wider structures (potentially those of the Spanish Empire, but in any case a global Christendom). With Argentina’s early Peronismo and related movements, we have a celebration of Spanish America as parent to a mixed criollo. With José Vasconcelos, Mexico’s one-time Secretary of Public Education, we have a fanciful mythology that understands mestizo (or ‘Indo-Hispano’) America not as the child of tragedy, son of victim and victimizer, but as a triumphant issue, what he called a raza cosmica, a ‘cosmic race.’
Compared to these competing paradigms, with their respective and, perhaps, mutually compatible orientations, Bolivarianism is somehow less satisfactory, more desperate. Yet this has precisely been its strength (or its usefulness). It builds on that mainly-Protestant propagation, the Black Legend concerning Spain, to present Latin America as radically wrong: the result of a more or less wholly condemnable historical process, thereby justifying a policy of thorough social transformation and, to this end, the wide-reaching exercise of power. Invoking—sometimes inventing—the scourges of a colonial past whose wounds are never healed makes that past permanently responsible for present problems, justifying practically any degree of state intervention. Grandstanding invocations of the specters of history by politicians involved in the wanton impoverishment of their citizenry is, therefore, par for the course.
Privilege and Revolution
Bolivar cannot be ejected from history and American selfhood. We must rather try to more fully understand him and, thereby, reframe his legacy. This is where we encounter Bolivar as a repentant revolutionary: were he a hero, he would be a tragic one. Much of the following is presented by the Spanish communist scholar Santiago Armesilla, from whose research I draw.
Bolivar was born in 1783 in Caracas, within the Venezuelan province of the then-Spanish Vice-regency of New Granada. His mother Maria Concepcion, was a descendent of the conquistador Francisco de Infante (and, therefore, of the Castilian King, St. Fernando III), as well as of the fantastically wealthy Juan de Juren. His father, Juan Vicente, was one of that territory’s wealthiest land (and slave) owners: an attorney who served as lieutenant to the governor of Puerto Rico and, thereafter, as administrator of the Royal Estate, a position he was appointed to by the Governor of Venezuela. Simón Vicente also solicited the marquisate of San Luis, which he was never to receive, and it is often said that the exclusion of Simón’s father from the empire’s formal aristocracy was perceived as a snub, motivating the son’s rebellion.
Bolivar himself studied in Madrid, marrying a native of that city, who died eight months after their wedding. He would never remarry, remaining, it seems, deeply devoted to his departed wife (which doesn’t mean he didn’t enjoy affairs with women throughout his life). While in Europe, he met and disliked the future King of Spain Fernando VII, and traveled to France, learning Jacobin ideas from his one-time confidant, Simón Rodríguez. It is also likely that he became a Freemason in Paris between the years 1804 and 1806. Interestingly, however, in 1828, he would make Freemasonry illegal in the independent Gran Colombia, falling out with the fraternity (albeit this move was likely aimed specifically at the Bogota lodge, some of whose members had conspired against him).
In 1810, he joined the Patriotic Society of Caracas, which was more or less in alignment with the British Empire, the latter representing a lucrative trade partner, as a buyer of contraband. 1811 would see the ephemeral declaration of Venezuelan independence, which was put down militarily by the Spanish royalist Captain-General Domingo de Monteverde. Two years later, in 1813, Bolivar issued a manifesto of independence with the support of the governor of the provinces of New Granada, Camilo Torres. This set off the so-called Admirable Campaign, which ended in the defeat of Domingo de Monteverde. He would be replaced by José Tomás Boves, who went on to take the city of Caracas. The separatists accused Boves of a massacre (specifically against the white population—Bolivar’s initial support base), but contrary sources indicate that there were few opponents for him to execute, and that, in any case, Boves issued a large number of pardons. He would eventually be betrayed and assassinated, possibly by his own second-in-command.
Just before the 1813 campaign, Bolivar issued a decree titled ‘War to the Death’ (Guerra a Muerte), which effaced the distinction between combatant and non-combatant, serving to justify the death-by-machete of loyalist civilians of Spanish birth, as well as prisoners and hospital patients. It is also the case, however, that this decree offered a pardon to those former royalist collaborators willing to switch sides.
The revolutionary character of Bolivar’s struggle comes through most clearly in the 1814 Manifiesto de Carúpano, where he advocates for the liberation of slaves. This was perhaps owed to the fact that Boves had mobilized African-descended, Amerindian, and mixed people who opposed the criollo class represented by Bolivar and his allies, so that the latter felt compelled to appeal to the non-European-descended population. While realpolitik may be a factor, we have no reason to see the separatists as purely cynical in their ethnic or class interests, and may grant that their abolitionism was sincere (post-independence Venezuela would finally end slavery in 1854, twenty-four years after Bolivar’s death).
The British Hand
Bolivar then traveled to British Jamaica, where, in 1815, he wrote the Carta de Jamaica. This contained an explicit ideological justification for his movement: Spain’s monarchy had broken its contract with the Spanish-descended ruling class of the Americas:
Emperor Charles V made a pact with the discoverers, conquerors, and settlers of America, which … constitutes our social contract. The kings of Spain solemnly agreed with these [discoverers, conquerors, and settlers] that the latter would execute it [the discovery, conquest, and settlement of America] at their own risk, forbidding them to do so at the expense of the Royal Treasury. For this reason, they were granted lordship over the land, and the right to organize its administration and exercise its judiciary functions … The King committed himself to never alienating the American provinces, as he had no other jurisdiction than that of the high domain [overarching functions], being a kind of feudal property that the conquerors had acquired for themselves and their descendants. [My translation]
Bolivar’s account somewhat overstates the matter, failing to do justice, for example, to the laws of Burgos and their protection of native peoples, the creation of semi-autonomous Indian Republics, and in general to the degree to which the crown and the Church were involved in American administration. Indeed, Spain had abolished structures like the encomiendas, which had allowed conquistadors to organize natives along the lines of feudal serfdom, very early on (which is why the sons of Hernan Cortes rebelled, feeling they deserved a greater inheritance on account of their father’s conquests than the crown was willing to grant).
He goes on to refer to laws that privilege those born in Spain as constituting a “manifest violation of the laws and subsisting covenants,” which, again, overstates things, as this privilege did not impede his family’s enjoyment of vast wealth. Bolivar is highlighting a true feature of the empire: its tendency to centralize. He is specifically rejecting Bourbon centralization, to which he contrasts the policies of the previous Habsburg dynasty.
He writes of what had held the empire together (a “reciprocal benevolence, a tender solicitude for the cradle and the glory of our fathers [Spain]”) before letting fall his rhetorical weight on the all-betraying, centralizing reforms. He describes the resulting hatred between America’s Spanish sons and those of the Peninsula as vaster than the ocean between them, waxing hyperbolic that it would be easier to unite the continents of Europe and America than to heal that breach. While always prone to fiery language (and rash action), passages like this are straightforward melodrama, especially when one reflects on his family’s material opulence, and that he is discussing the loss of privilege faced by his class, not (in this case) the plight of the poor.
Worse, melodrama meets servility, as one gets the sense that Bolivar is catering to the British, securing their support by excluding any possibility of a rapprochement with Spain and presenting himself as an unflinching ally of Britain. (An indication that these sections of the Carta de Jamaica are mere superlative verbiage, that his feelings on this point were transient would come scarcely five years later, when Bolivar sued for reconciliation with Spain, offering her the chance to confederate with Greater Colombia.)
Presumably, as precedent for Spain’s treatment of Bolivar’s own class, the Carta de Jamaica refers to the pre-Columbine lords of America, bemoaning the fates of Moctezuma and Atahualpa, the last Aztec and Incan emperors. Because of the dereliction of Spain’s ruling classes in producing their own propaganda, and given the insistent promotion of an anti-Spanish Black Legend by their rivals, educated classes within the empire were not immune to that contagion. Bolivar, for his part, imbibed the invented and embellished accounts of the Black Legend, portraying Spain’s conquest of America as negatively as possible. He considered the Spanish empire to be principally an enterprise of resource extraction (see The Spanish Empire and its Legacy for a refutation of this view) and is wholly uncritical when citing Bartolome de las Casas, for example, whose claims we now know to be grotesque exaggerations.
Contradictions and Contraband
Historical inaccuracies aside, Bolivar’s rhetorical strategy is strange, since the perpetrators of outrages against native Americans would have been his own ancestors, not the Spaniards who stayed in Spain and against whose authority he was rebelling. Indeed, as we have seen, he also claims that Spain had once been more or less aloof, allowing her children in the Americas to run things as they would: he discusses that original arrangement as though it were a legitimate social contract, even though it is precisely during this early phase that Moctezuma and Atahualpa lost their realms, and the episodes Bartolome de las Casas writes about would have taken place.
The remoteness of Madrid’s authority would go towards exonerating her of the crimes Bolivar means to impute, which, again, would precisely fall on his ancestors and class. His thought is murky here. The revolutionary is trying to unite contradictory narratives: a positive view of Charles V’s decentralized empire and the Black Legend. The one justifies the ‘social contract’ enjoyed by his class and a present rebellion on account of the breaking of this contract; the other justifies war with Spain and caters to British narratives. Whatever argument he is making, it is difficult to pin down.
If he does settle on a single account, it is in the following sentence:
We are not Indians, nor Europeans, but a middle species between the legitimate owners of the country and the Spanish usurpers.
With this phrase, previous talk of a ‘social contract’—and the implied reliance on its violation—to justify revolution is unceremoniously nullified. For now, it seems there was never any legitimacy in those who held to that contract, being that they were ‘usurpers.’ Thus, we repeatedly get the sense that he is undermining his own argument, as well as besmirching his ancestors (the loss of whose privileges he nonetheless bemoans) in order to kowtow to the official British line and so retain that country’s support. Again, the Carta de Jamaica is partly a means to reassure Britain that Bolivar’s reconciliation with Spain is out of the question. In this light, it should perhaps be read more as a political play than a coherent, ideological formulation.
Indeed, just one year before arriving in Jamaica, Bolivar had described the Spanish empire in very different terms. In May of 1814, distraught over the war in Venezuela (Caracas), he declared: “Blood runs in torrents. Three centuries of culture, enlightenment, and industry have disappeared.” True, the full statement is optimistic, attempting to rouse his soldiers, and it also contains more typical references to the slavery under which he regarded his country to be toiling. But the characterization of Spanish imperial rule as a time of “culture, enlightenment, and industry” is hard to reconcile with the Carta de Jamaica.
To summarize the substance of Bolivar’s argument, then: he asserts a natural right of rulership by European-descended “discoverers, conquerors, and settlers,” without contradicting that of previous lords, a consequent right to secession due to the violation of that natural right by certain Spanish kings, and also a modern imperative towards “federal democratic government … the rights of man … the balance of powers and establishing general laws in favor of civil liberty, freedom of the press, and others.” This reliance on ius naturale is standard for early liberalism, in which school we may comfortably situate Bolivar.
Having surveyed some of the underpinnings and material supports of his project, we may already begin questioning the desirability of that ‘dream of Bolivar’ which, from St. Peter’s seat, Jorge Bergoglio recently—whimsically—recommended to the impoverished continent that saw his birth. We will proceed to lay out the devastating consequences of that dream—and the final regret of its dreamer—in Part II.
