Simon Bolivar, between & star; Star Wars & apos ;, a cruel Robespierre and the dictators novel

• Coward, vain and womanizer. A German vision

Does anyone remember the dictator's novel? Bermúdez Key, the Supreme, the President, Tirano Banderas, El Chivo and everyone else ... Any reader owes a few hours of joy to a genre that, over the years, has revealed itself as taboo. The dictator novel, we learned later, seemed to confirm a picturesque, violent and irrational image of Latin America that Europeans later projected to the news we found in the newspapers about Chavez, the Kirchners, Fujimori, Correa, Ortega, Calderón and company . So Latin American writers abandoned the issue and reproached it as an unfair folklore . Have there been no tyrants in Europe? Doesn't the crudeness of Latin American history respond to the colonial caste system? Mario Vargas Llosa may be his last and persevering practitioner.

It is a fair criticism. But that does not mean that the dictator's novel is not linked to reality or without appeal. The proof must now be found on the shelves of non-fiction books, where you can already find The Bolivarian Terror , by the Colombian Pablo Victoria (The Sphere of the Books). Upon returning from the holidays, Bolívar, liberator of America , of the Peruvian Marie Arana (Debate) will join him. And it will not be easy to find two such opposite books dedicated to the same subject: the life of Simón Bolívar, tyrant and liberator of America. Homer, George Washington, Napoleon, Robespierre of his continent.

Let's start with Bolívar, liberator of America . Marie Arana's book was written in English and is originally intended for the American reader. The author, since its introduction, insists on the parallel between the figure of Bolivar and that of Gerge Washington and regrets that the northern neighbors ignore such an epic life that seems perfect for Hollywood .

And Arana is also right, at least in that: his Bolívar reads what an adventure movie looks like on a Saturday afternoon . The information is overwhelming although more or less known and is told as in a story that only fata the happy ending.

A summary: Bolívar was born rich but he was not a happy child because he was an orphan. He grew up as a deflower , guarded by irresponsible and greedy preceptors, until he fell into the hands of an enlightened culture teacher named Simón Rodríguez. His social class was that of the Mantuans , the rich Creoles but excluded from the administration of the colony , and from it he received a very critical view of the Empire; however, he marched to Spain on something like a formation trip. He entered the decadent court of Charles IV, played badminton with Prince Ferdinand (and wounded him in a sports accident), was a rake and a crush, traveled to France as an admirer of Napoleon but returned disenchanted with him , married and widowed as in a romantic novel, fraternized with wise men like naturalist Alexander von Humboldt ...

A subsection: according to Enrique Krauze , Humboldt left written many years later the bad personal opinion he had of the young Bolivar, so that the beautiful cameo is, in fact, a bit embarrassing confusion . It seems an anecdote, but it explains what is the appeal and suspicion of Marie Arana's book. Your Bolivar is more story than History.

When young Bolivar returned to America, his critical vision of the Spanish Empire had already become an obsessive hatred. France had occupied the Peninsula and the opportunity was perfect. The future Liberator led a revolt of notables, the Conjuration of the Mantuans , which in the book of Marie Arana has the logic of a fight of good against evil. Bolivar fought against the royalists just as Luke Skywalker fought against Darth Vader .

But the reality is always a little more complicated. Here appears the Bolivarian terror of Pablo Victoria to set the counterpoint.

Victoria also presents her book with a novelistic air, explains it as the discovery of a secret and buried story in which the myth vanishes and the hero becomes a villain. In its 724 pages, Victoria accesses and disseminates the personal archive of Joaquín de Mosquera y Figueroa, the Colombian who presided over the Regency of Spain of 1812, and follows his thread to redress the Empire, which, according to his vision, was a system that offered order and justice in reasonable quantities to his subjects.

And although a political / cultural agenda is intuited in its pages, Victoria's book is more similar to Arana's than an academic work. The facts have a more complex analysis. For example, the war that faced realists and liberators appears here as the conflict between two American social classes in which the promise of freedom only applied to some. Thus, in the ranks loyal to the Empire it did not represent only the Spanish elite: there were also the brown , the poor or middle-class, urban and dark-skinned mass , who felt that the Empire defended their interests better than the Creoles. Arana recognizes that paradox in his book, although he does it lightly.

That war of independence was creepyly violent, full of acts destined to terrorize rivals: entire villages exterminated, dismembered leaders, raped women ... The theory of Arana's book gathers the traditional vision of the liberating Bolivar and argues that the violence of the Independence was always in response to that of the realists. The idea that Victoria tries to prove, file by file, holds the opposite: that Bolívar was a brutal Robespierre who purged the brightest of his people for fear of competition and ruled the new republics on a whim.

Bolívar was a powerful myth already alive but antibolivarismo grew up where the liberator was supposed to leave the seeds of emancipation . Why? Arana speaks of the betrayal that is in the essence of the human being. Victoria defends that this emancipation was false and that those who challenged the Liberator were acting in legitimate defense of their interests.

«I wish that the justice of the peoples be established according to the times of the Spaniards». «Lately I have deplored until the [insurrection] we have made against the Spaniards». They are two phrases by Simón Bolívar, and after his glory and solitude, that Pablo Victoria rescues in his book to guarantee his vision of the hero's failure .

Bolivar died poor and alone. He had got rid of all his wealth for the benefit of his revolution and had only been able to raise a few dollars for the jewels he kept in his house. He fled Bogotá along with a few faithful in what Arana describes as a sad ride at dawn through mists. He dedicated his last days of Calvary to rewrite his history. Its final, self- exculpatory and, at the same time, fictional and exalted , will please readers of Bolivarian Terror as well as those of Bolivar, liberator of America.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

• history
• Venezuela
• Colombia
• literature

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