by John Lynch
In styling himself the man of difficulties, Bolívar was also expressing his readiness to take responsibility, for failures as well as successes. Failure itself was a challenge, another obstacle to be overcome; his ability to pick himself up from adversity was notorious and helps to account for his soldiers’ faith in him and their acceptance of his defeats. In the ‘Manifesto of Carúpano’, which brought to an end the miserable campaign of 1814, he acknowledged that he was not blameless for the collapse of resistance. At Pasto in 1822 his reluctance to accept less praise than Sucre was simply an admission that a leader could not afford to diminish his glory if he wanted to retain allegiance. There was, however, a limit to his willingness to accept blame for constitutional failure and the difficulty of finding a solution to the political problems of the Union. For this he blamed a series of enemies ranging from Santander and his political cronies in Bogotá, to caudillos in the regions, and in the final analysis to an immature people. Who can say he was wrong?
Leadership is a variable concept and makes different demands in different ages. But one constant is the ability to inspire people, to excite the mind and stir the heart, and to make everything seem possible. Many of Bolívar’s projects, creations of his own mind, looked like madness to others. To restart the revolution from New Granada, to invade Venezuela from Haiti, to abandon Caracas for Angostura, and then, most mind–boggling of all, to switch strategy westwards across the Andes, were not ideas immediately understood by his followers or accepted by his colleagues. And more was to come: mobilization for a campaign in the south and then for the invasion of Peru, a foreign country in the eyes of most Colombians, and finally a leading role in Bolivia. Many of these projects appeared risky or even impossible, and they demanded constant sacrifices from the people. Bolívar had to convince critics, motivate doubters, reassure the clergy, and keep warlords in line. The case was not always easy to argue, but thanks to his eloquence, his reputation and his position at the front, in short to his supreme leadership, each call was answered and the revolution could advance again. This was not blind obedience. People followed, if not out of conviction then from faith in Bolívar, inspired by what o’Leary called ‘the magic of his prestige’.34
The Cult of Bolívar
The days of triumph passed and his leadership was challenged. He had always had ‘enemies’ but after his return to Bogotá in 1826, bringing with him his Bolivian Constitution, now for universal consumption, he began to lose prestige as well as support. The historic victories had created and nurtured his glory. Boyacá, a great triumph over Spain and over nature, raised him to the summit: now he was the Padre de la Patria, the soul of the nation’s independence and nationality, the accepted saviour of Colombia as well as of Venezuela. But the time came when his victories were a memory, a time when people began to look ahead and think of a future without Bolívar. Then his glory became even more precious and in greater need of protection. This was the mood of his waning years. The man who seized the moment in 1810 also timed his exit in 1830. The tragedy of his premature death was his final glory, a glory undimmed by longevity and the fate of an unsuccessful administrator.
The story of Bolívar reached its nadir in his compatriots’ refusal to have him on Colombian territory, followed by his melancholy journey into exile, and final days on the Caribbean coast. The irony of the following years would not have been lost on Bolívar: author of Colombian unity and victim of its collapse, he depended for his rehabilitation in his native land on his enemy’s campaign for his return. He owed few favours to Páez but the instability of post–Bolivarian Venezuela persuaded the caudillo to seek once more the saving hand of the Liberator. After a first gesture in 1833, it was February 1842 before Páez made a serious effort to have the remains of the Liberator repatriated. He urged congress that it would be appropriate and a matter of political duty to restore Bolívar ‘so that in future public esteem for the memory of the Liberator may rest on the national vote legitimately expressed, and the demonstrations of thanks and admiration for his great deeds of patriotism and humanity shall be in accord with the wishes of the legislators’.35 At a time when civil unrest was never far away and the opposition readily reached for weapons rather than arguments, it was to the advantage of Páez and other politicians to bathe themselves in vicarious glory and associate themselves with the record of Bolívar.
In November 1842 the body of Bolívar was exhumed from the Cathedral of Santa Marta, escorted in a small fleet to La Guaira and from there transported to Caracas, where it arrived on 16 December. Amidst exuberant funeral honours the body was followed in procession by leaders of the government, the Church, the military, the administration, the foreign envoys and ‘an elegant body of citizens’; it was received in a solemn requiem liturgy and entombed first in the church of San Francisco then in the cathedral of Caracas, an occasion described and interpreted by Fermín Toro, politician, journalist and spokesman for the conservative oligarchy. To extol Bolívar without criticizing the congress that had delayed his return required a careful approach, as he weaved his argument around the unity between Bolívar and the nation. Homage to the Father and Liberator was homage to the fatherland; the voice of the people had broken through and twelve years of error, envy and calumny now ended in a supreme national celebration. Who is great in these days? Who is strong as a rock? He who bequeathed to Venezuelans and to the masas populares the liberty won in battle and left them the means to defend it.36 Páez himself added the final touch. ‘The prosperity of Venezuela was the first thought of Bolívar, the first motive of his heroic deeds; we have omitted nothing we could possibly do in honouring his memory. It is not only the triumph of Bolívar that we celebrate: it is also the triumph of Venezuela. We have witnessed the arrival on our shores of the great Bolívar escorted by the warships of powerful nations mixing their flags with ours in honour of the Hero, in honour of Venezuela.’37
So the cult of Bolívar was born, and he was reunited with his native Venezuela, a country without a distinguished prehistory or an outstanding colonial experience, and great only in the independence he had won for it. In his lifetime he had gathered around him the Bolivarians, a select group of soldiers and officials who had served him loyally out of respect for his talents and deference to his leadership. Now there were new Bolivarians – historians, journalists, priests, politicians and presidents – who created and guarded a cult around an idealized Bolívar, who served the needs of an abject people. The cultists had a good story. A hero of pure Venezuelan lineage, after a tragic marriage and golden youth in Europe, assumes the leadership of national independence, provides the intellectual base of a continental revolution, and then the military and political talents to create a union of states and win international respect, all the time asserting his manhood as a glorious lover. There were many Bolívars here, with any of whom people could identify. Venezuelan nationalist, American hero, macho male, Bolívar conformed to the roles. But hero–worship was not the same as the cult. This had a greater purpose. Bolívar was a model for the nation. A post–colonial people who, through no fault of their own, had been rendered incapable of improvement or of enjoying the liberty he had won for them, could be saved by his example and his guidance. Listen to his words and Venezuela can escape from the abyss. He is not God: that would be blasphemy. But he is a saint with a cult parallel to religion, teaching political virtues complementary to the religious truths of the Catholic faith.
The original outpouring of popular and spontaneous feeling for Bolívar was succeeded by a new phase of the cult, more regimented and government–inspired, which passed from a cult of the people to a cult for the people, and in which he was presented as a democrat, a revolutionary, a moral guide and a Catholic.38 The doctrine was preached from on high and taught in the schools. A Catechism of Venezuelan History gave the correct version of Independence. Referring to the London mission of Simón Bolívar, Luis López Méndez and Andrés Bello in 1810, it asks: Who were the commissioners?
And it answers
: The principal was Colonel Simón Bolívar, to whose exertions and talents was subsequently due not only the independence of Venezuela but of almost the whole of South America, and whose glory rose to become the first and most brilliant of the world of Columbus.
As the cult developed, presidents pushed forward to become its leading advocates. Antonio Guzmán Blanco, Illustrious American, dictator in the positivist ‘order and progress’ style, and far from the Bolivarian model of ruler, took the cult to new heights. In 1874 the equestrian statue of the Liberator was erected in the Plaza Bolívar in Caracas. In October 1876 the remains of Bolívar were solemnly transferred from the cathedral to the new National Pantheon. In 1879 the publication of the Memorias of o’Leary was decreed, fulfilling the duty ‘to exalt the glories of Venezuela’s most illustrious hero’. The high point of Guzmán Blanco’s Bolivarianism was reached in July 1883 when he presided over the centenary of Bolívar’s birth with extraordinary pomp; a plethora of speeches, articles, celebrations and new statues marked the glorification of the Liberator by a ruler who personified many of the Liberator’s notorious aversions. The man who tried to establish a national Venezuelan Church free from Rome, something that Bolívar specifically rejected, exemplified the division between the cult of Bolívar and the real history of the Liberator.
In 1876 Guzmán Blanco had bought the historic town house of the Bolívar family, birthplace of the Liberator, which had been badly damaged in the earthquake of 1812. With the help of public subscription this was later acquired from the dictator’s heirs and in October 1912 formally accepted for the nation by Juan Vicente Gómez, another caudillo turned president. Reconstructed and embellished, the Casa Natal del Libertador in the centre of Caracas was inaugurated on 5 July 1921, the anniversary of the battle of Carabobo; it became an archive and gallery, housing the Archivo del Libertador and the works of Tito Salas in celebration of the life of the hero, the whole a shrine to the Liberator. Meanwhile, the Sociedad Bolivariana de Venezuela was promoted to the status of a national institution under the patronage of General Eleazar López Contreras and became the official depositary and guardian of the glory of the Liberator.39 And Vicente Lecuna, the scholarly custodian of the cult, laid down the authorized version in a series of works designed to dispel doubt and resist dissent.40
So Bolívar defies history, ‘doomed to death though fated not to die’. The apotheosis has gone far beyond the real Liberator, creating an ideal and a myth, a fiction to serve its authors. Bolívar himself did not establish the cult. Guardian of his own glory, he would have been scornful of any attempt by his fellow Americans to glorify him. Yet his life, his achievements, his great battles became embedded in their culture almost as soon as they happened. The memory of them had many layers. It was kept alive first in pure admiration. Then out of respect. And finally as propaganda, serving a number of needs. He symbolized what Venezuela could be and had so far failed to be; he was the national conscience against which Venezuelans could be judged in their efforts to secure good government and a just society. He was a boon to governments. When Venezuelans were bewildered and needed instant guidance, it was easier to rely on Bolívar to tell them what to do than to develop new policies. Fear of anarchy found consolation in Bolívar, who expressed a similar fear every year of his leadership.
Bolívar compensated for a national feeling of inferiority to the world, especially to Europe. He enabled Venezuelans to raise themselves in international esteem. He was the first Latin American of real universal dimension who enabled them to escape from the tendency to self–deprecation. As a white Venezuelan he could speak to Europe and the United States on equal terms. The thoughts of Bolívar on Spanish American unity and his efforts on behalf of the Congress of Panama were hailed as relevant beyond his own time. In the words of a leading Bolivarian historian, ‘Without violent internal crises, without racial hatreds, without religious conflicts, without class struggles, with positive and solid political liberty and equality, Spanish America will be able to devote itself to the peaceful and vigorous conquest and domination of its environment and a realization of its own being by applying the revolutionary plan prepared by Bolívar.’41
Juan Vicente González (1810–66), politician and journalist, and fervent admirer of Bolívar, came closest to deifying the Liberator and recommending him to the adoration of Venezuelans, miserable creatures dedicated to the absurd destruction of the great work of one who by his eloquence alone set an example to his countrymen. There was no one his superior, no one his equal. Take away Bolívar, he asked, and what have we left? A crucial question in any explanation of the cult. There were no other great heroes. González was followed closely by Guzmán Blanco, who described him as ‘an incomparable man’, a ‘semigod’: ‘Bolívar, like Jesus Christ, is not a hero of a fantastic epic. He is the Liberator of the continent, the Creator of the American republics, the Father of free citizens. He was born for this; for this God endowed him with all the talents, with courage, daring, and perseverance found no where else on earth, in the past, in the present, and in the future.’42 This interpretation was taken a stage further in more recent times when, in 1980, the Cardinal Archbishop of Caracas referred to the ‘sin of Venezuela’ in demanding Bolívar’s exile in 1830 and thus repudiating his character as the chosen of God: ‘The infamous proposal of exile against the Father of the Patria, accepted without protest by the Venezuelan nation, was a clear rejection of his character as the divine chosen one. And this is the reason why ever since 1830, when this iniquity was committed, our national history for the whole of the past century can be summarized as one of devastating civil wars and prolonged tyrannies, barely separated by brief and precarious periods of peace.’43 Not a word about the carnage of liberation.
Venezuelan homage to Bolívar culminated in the memorable year 1983. The bicentenary of the Liberator’s birth brought together the whole gamut of Bolivarian interest. Government, politicians, the military, academics, the arts, business and somewhere perhaps the people, joined to pay homage to the Liberator in a series of public acts, performances, congresses, publications and endless receptions, all worthy of the hero and a fitting salute to his memory. Serious scholarship had a role, and research as well as adulation paid homage to the Liberator. Ironically, the celebrations were held in the midst of a national crisis, when, with its financial world collapsing, Venezuela continued to spend in style, opening a new metro, hosting international congresses, staging the bicentenary and holding a decisive election. Was 1983 the last year of the cult? From the Liberator there was only silence, no answers, no rescue, and from his admirers no petitions for guidance. But there was still time for a new twist to the story, a modern perversion of the cult.
In 1998 Venezuelans were astonished to learn that their country had been renamed ‘the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela’ by decree of President Hugo Chávez, who called himself a ‘revolutionary Bolivarian’. Authoritarian populists, or neo–caudillos, or Bolivarian militarists, whatever their designation, invoke Bolívar no less ardently than did previous rulers, though it is doubtful whether he would have responded to their calls. The traditional cult of Bolívar had been used as a convenient ideology by military dictators, culminating in the regimes of Juan Vicente Gómez and Eleazar López Contreras; these had at least more or less respected the basic thought of the Liberator, even when they misrepresented its meaning. But the new heresy, far from maintaining continuity with the constitutional ideas of Bolívar, as was claimed, invented a new attribute, the populist Bolívar, and in the case of Cuba gave him a new identity, the socialist Bolívar. By exploiting the authoritarian tendency, which certainly existed in the thought and action of Bolívar, regimes in Cuba and Venezuela claim the Liberator as a patron for their policies, distorting his ideas in the process.44 Thus the Bolívar of liberty and equality is appropriated by a Marxist regime, which does not hold liberty and equality in high esteem but needs a substitute for the failed Soviet model. And in Venezuela a populist regime of the twenty–first century
, looking for political legitimacy, is drawn to Bolívar as to a magnet, another victim of the spell. Who is to say that it will be the last?
NOTES
Abbreviations
AGN Archivo General de la Nación, Caracas
BAGN Boletín del Archivo General de la Nación
BANH Biblioteca de la Academia Nacional de la Historia, Venezuela
BHN Biblioteca de Historia Nacional, Colombia
BOLANH Boletín de la Academia Nacional de la Historia, Caracas
FJB, AL Fundación John Boulton, Caracas, Archivo del Libertador
HAHR Hispanic American Historical Review
ILAS Institute of Latin American Studies, London
JLAS Journal of Latin American Studies
PRO Public Record Office, the National Archives, London
Chapter 1
1. José Domingo Díaz, Recuerdos sobre la rebelión de Caracas (BANH, 38, Caracas, 1961), 98–9.
2. Alexander von Humboldt, Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent during the Years 1799–1804, trans. Helen Maria Williams, 6 vols (London, 1814–29), IV, 12–17. Humboldt was not present during the earthquake but used a manuscript narrative of events in Caracas in 1812 by Luis Delpeche.
3. Gaceta de Caracas, 25 April 1812.
4. The ‘Detached Recollections’ of General D.F. o’Leary, ed. R.A. Humphreys (London, 1969), 36.
5. Robert J. Ferry, The Colonial Elite of Early Caracas: Formation and Crisis 1567–1767 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1989), 208–11.
