Time to liberate the Liberator

The Economist ^ | Feb 7th 2008 | Staff

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Venezuela's president rewrites the history of his hero

IN LATIN AMERICA it often seems that the past is of more moment than the present, and nowhere more so than in Venezuela. Hugo Chávez, the country's leftist president, invokes Simón Bolívar, the liberator of northern South America from Spain, as his inspiration. He claims to be leading a “Bolivarian Revolution” and has renamed the country the “Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela”.

Last month Mr Chávez took this cult of the past a step further. On January 28th the official gazette carried decrees setting up two investigative committees. The first will look at (deteriorating) public health in the capital. The second, composed of the vice-president, no fewer than ten ministers, the attorney-general and the head of the cultural institute, has a weightier mission: its job is to “clear up the important doubts woven around the death of the Liberator”. In December, Mr Chávez said that Bolívar might have been poisoned by his Colombian opponents. That is not his only extravagant claim. He has implied that Bolívar was a socialist or even a communist, comparing him to both Mao Zedong and Che Guevara.

Bolívar was indeed a great military leader. He believed that the newly liberated countries should stick together. In that sense he is rightly held up as an early champion of Latin American integration, even though sticking together proved impossible. Yet many of his political ideas were very different from Mr Chávez's.

Bolívar was a Venezuelan aristocrat who inherited estates and mines. He was a man of the Enlightenment, a reader of Adam Smith and John Locke as well as of Voltaire and Rousseau. He was an economic liberal who freed his own slaves, but a political conservative. He believed the new republics needed strong government. He admired the United States, although he feared its potential power. He was a devoted Anglophile—hardly the attitude of an “anti-imperialist”.

His soldierly imperiousness caused him to be disliked in Peru and in highland Colombia. In 1828 a group of conspirators in Bogotá, tiring of his dictatorship, broke into the presidential palace bent on murdering him. Bolívar escaped. But after the (unconnected) murder of Sucre, his most loyal general, he set off, ailing and disillusioned, for a proposed exile in Europe.

Bolívar got as far as the port of Santa Marta, where in 1830 he expired from tuberculosis. In a beautifully written novel, “The General in his Labyrinth”, Gabriel García Márquez, a Colombian writer, modishly portrayed Bolívar as a man of the people traduced by a reactionary oligarchy. But neither Mr García Márquez nor any serious historian has suggested that he was poisoned. John Lynch, his most recent biographer, points out that the dying Bolívar was watched over by a “qualified and conscientious” French doctor whose medical bulletins were published in Caracas in 1875-78. In his book, Mr Lynch accuses Mr Chávez of “a modern perversion” of the longstanding cult of Bolívar encouraged by many Venezuelan presidents.

It was surely not coincidental that Mr Chávez made his poisoning claim while trying to stir up nationalist feeling against Colombia, accusing its generals of wanting to assassinate him. As the bicentenary of the start of Latin America's independence struggle in 1810 approaches, it may be time for a different sort of investigative committee to be set up. Let historians liberate the poor Liberator from the politicians who would abuse his name.

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-—IMHO, trying to educate masses of South Americans is as futile as trying to educate masses of present-day United States citizens-—