On December 17, 1830, just 47 years of age, Simón Bolívar, the most important leader of Latin American independence, died on the northern coast of New Granada (today Colombia), the cause long thought to be tuberculosis. En route to Europe, he was leaving the hemispheric and international stage he had dominated for almost 20 years. Escorting him were 100 soldiers and members of his personal and military staff, including servant/squire José Palacios who had been a slave of Bolívar’s family; Belford Hilton Wilson who in 1822 had come from London at the recommendation of his prominent father to join Bolívar’s inner circle following in the footsteps of the near 7000 private British and Irish citizens that beginning in 1816 had crossed the Atlantic to fight under Bolívar; and Agustín Jerónimo de Iturbide who had arrived in 1827 and was a son of the leader of Mexican independence who had crowned himself emperor in 1822 only to be deposed, then executed.1 But entourage notwithstanding, Bolívar was not on a state mission. The world-famous figure was going to Europe as an exile, cast out by the elites of Bogotá and declared persona non grata in his homeland of Venezuela.
These, the final moments in the life of Bolívar are a good place to start for our study of Bolívar’s afterlife in the Americas, especially when drawn from the brilliant and informed imagination of Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez whose novel of 1989 we are using as one source. Bolívar is exiting, richly accompanied. The figures escorting him provide García Márquez’s readers, and now us, with threads linking to individuals, processes, and contexts. As García Márquez knew well, these interests have their own history in the story of how Bolívar has been represented. Explored over 300 pages, the ending of Bolívar’s life that García Márquez is newly defining and that has been the subject of so much attention with interpreters beginning their narration at different moments acquires depth and texture. It becomes much more than a finale.
Bolívar is the preeminent symbol of Latin America and the focus of what could seem almost unrivaled posthumous attention, seen from his own times forward as a force now for liberalism or other forms of modernity, now for old regime values and authoritarianism, now for a mix of the two, with the debate over the meaning of his figure having no end in sight. He comes to us in biographies, histories, bulletins, political essays, addresses, and numerous artistic renderings by painters, poets, fiction writers, architects, and sculptors; in the built environment there are statues and public buildings that construct for him a legacy. Comparing the different iterations of his figure in the facets of his afterlife is difficult to do, as information is never constituted in the same way and the contexts for engagement with his figure are inherently different.
We see Bolívar in the independence period 1810–1825, including his battles and his major public texts. We hear of his relationships to his lieutenants, those who were loyal to him and those who were not. We move quickly from one point in his life to the next, lapping up a smattering of scenes: his 1815 Jamaica Letter ; his controversial 1817 execution of a star rival, African- and European-descended general Manuel Píar; the multiracial state he advocated in his 1819 Angostura Address; his miraculous crossing of the Andes in 1819; his dictatorship from August 27, 1828 to January 20, 1830; his exile in May 1830; and his death that became prominent in the minds of the publics of the Americas in 1930 at the moment of the centenary of his passing celebrated throughout the hemisphere. It was the second major hemispheric centenary of his figure, the first that of his birth in 1883.
Digging further, we learn more of the figure he cut for himself in the period 1825–1830, after independence from Spain and in the context of the political instability that prevailed throughout the new republics of Spanish America. From his personal letters we find out about his views on the old colonial town councils (cabildos) that resist the centralization he wants for his region; his recourse to racist formulations to explain social fragmentation and to dismiss from his perch in Bogotá a Mexican hero of independence, none other than Vicente Guerrero, who was briefly president of the new republic in 1829; and his continuing deployment of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s concepts of civic virtue and the general will. These concepts carried importance for him from the start of his career as military man and leader—virtuous citizens now more than ever the salvation of the state. On April 12, 1828, in the context of the constituent assembly he called (the Convención de Ocaña/the Ocaña Convention), he states in a letter to his long-time comrade-in-arms and now in effect governing partner, José Antonio Páez: “I will make many sacrifices in submitting to the general will but I will never accept even the title of citizen in a country badly constituted and for that reason discordant and weak.”2
We also learn about revolt and resistance in the decades previous to independence: actors who were indigenous and mestizo (Indian and Spanish descended) who rose up against the colonial state; and creoles like Bolívar (Spanish born in Latin America) who embraced Enlightenment thought, particularly the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, and as Bolívar would later, the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, as they sought to rally support for separation from Spain but who were imprisoned or executed when apprehended.
How and why do we know Bolívar? Why do the different locations that his interpreters occupy matter? Why do we know of some acts, battles, texts, and moments and not others? These questions provide the foundation for our study of the uses of Bolívar in the republics of the Americas, and our inquiry will help us see why that story—his afterlife—must concern us as an object of investigation. No figure, it can be argued, has been more integrated into the cultural and political discourse of a region than Bolívar has in the Americas. Another biography is not vital; rather we are looking to illuminate the conditions that make Bolívar’s life felicitous for postmortem symbolism and exploitation.
In this book we examine that integration as we reconstruct the processes and actors that create Bolívar’s afterlife. We aim to recover not Bolívar but those who have been concerned with him, some well known, others not, all intervening in their national traditions and/or the Americas in important ways using his figure and those who were connected to him. What will unfold is a vast network of transmission that, for the most part, has not been visible or that has been visible only in parts, parts mistaken for wholes. If surrealism, existentialism, Marxism, Freudianism, post-structuralism, and deconstruction have provided common languages for actors in the world to engage with in different settings, so has the figure of Bolívar. Yet there is a fundamental difference. The discursive world of Bolívar offers no methodology, nothing to study (though some have tried to), only an historically significant and complex life that those who have come after him have for different reasons used as a platform, some seeing Bolívar as the paradigmatic humanistic model or hero who provides lessons for the present, others either critiquing that vision or seeing him in entirely different ways. Bolívar—the Bolívar of his afterlives—is meaningful for the present, for us, on account of what he can tell us about the past. That past, which is multiple, is the cultural and political history of the nations of the Americas.
The history of the uses of Bolívar and of those of figures related to him that we tell in this book passes through two narrative frames, worked and reworked by interpreters. For them it is a question of literacy, just as it must be for us.
The first is that of independence, a process triggered by Napoleon who was a contemporary of Bolívar and with whom Bolívar is often paired. Napoleon’s occupation of the Iberian Peninsula in 1808 spurred the creation of juntas (provisional governments) across the domains of Spain in the Americas, juntas that initially declared loyalty to Fernando VII, placed by Napoleon under house arrest in Bayonne, France. In Spain there was immediate military resistance to the invasion. Juntas also formed there, and a military alliance was established with the United Kingdom. In southwestern Spain “the Cortes” was refounded. This was Spain’s parliament, which declared in 1812 a constitutional monarchy with the absent Fernando VII to uphold that constitution upon his return and that included representatives from colonies still controlled by Spain.
In Latin America the wars and political processes that began in 1809 with the first junta in La Paz, Bolivia (its members soon executed) unfolded in three major theaters—the viceroyalty of New Spain centered in what is today Mexico; northern South America; and southern South America. They were defined to different degrees by division from within, with allegiances split between royalist and independentist, centralist and regionalist. The context they shared was that of a global order upended by Napoleon, followed by the new conservative European regime in the form of the Holy Alliance that came into being after his defeat in 1814, which for Spaniards and colonials meant the return of a Fernando VII who surprisingly for many reestablished absolute monarchy subsequent to the four-year tenure of the Cortes. In the northern South American theater, Bolívar and his lieutenants won great victories, but also suffered terrible and consequential losses, traversing vast swaths of unimaginably difficult terrain.
Looking at the period of independence (1809–1825), we come upon scenes told and retold, each one acqu...