By José Steinsleger on September 29, 2021
I was scribbling notes for a brief commentary on the re-launching of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC, sixth Summit, Mexico, September 18), when I stopped at a reader’s letter published in El Correo Ilustrado , entitled “Simón Bolívar’s impossible dream”.
The letter says: “Simón Bolívar’s dream is unrealizable, because it is a dream of the Creole elites that since the 19th century have been fighting among themselves and against those of other countries. This dream is impossible, because the Creole elites ignore, despise and disregard the peoples they have misgoverned during these two centuries”.
He ends: “On the contrary, those ‘discovered since millennia before the invasion’ (sic) lived integrated in a civilization from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, which the Europeans came to exploit and fragment”. This is a great confusion, possibly well-intentioned.
Reasonable, the first paragraph of the letter: the role of the “Creole elites” in the face of “Bolivar’s dream”. On the other hand, the second one incurs in the reductionism of imagining “the ‘discovered’ […] integrated in a civilization”. Now then: one or several civilizations, with different degrees of evolution? One or several “Creole elites”?
The independence fighters belonged, indeed, to the “Creole elites”. However, it would be simplistic to equate their ideological profiles, since after Napoleon’s invasion of Spain, the “elites” split into two main groups: liberals and conservatives. E.g.: Hidalgo, Morelos and the “emperor” Iturbide, in New Spain; Bolivar and Santander, in Greater Colombia; San Martin, Artigas and Rivadavia, in the Río de la Plata.
Not by fatality or determinism, the Creoles loyal to the “left wing” of independence were betrayed, shot, assassinated, forgotten, or died in exile suffering untold miseries. It was useless. Thus, when the “right wing” realized that the peoples were keeping their memory alive, it consented to erect monuments to them, although emptying their ideas of political coherence.
England and the United States (a power in the making at the time) closely followed the course of the struggles in Spanish America. For example, a year before the victory of the Bolivarian armies in Ayacucho (Peru, 1824), President James Monroe coined the phrase that the political caste in Washington elevated to doctrine, and to this day bears engraved on its forehead: “America for the Americans”.
Two years after Ayacucho, Bolivar convened the Amphictyonic Congress of Panama, with the purpose of seeking the union or confederation of the new American states. For various reasons, the congress came to nothing. Frustration that the Liberator let glimpse in a letter to the English colonel Patricio Campbell: “the United States seem destined by Providence to plague America with miseries in the name of Liberty” (Guayaquil, August 5, 1829). Impossible dream” or political clarity?
In its growth, the United States had three stages: expansionist towards the West and the North (genocide of the native peoples, purchase of Louisiana in 1803 and Alaska in 1867), and annexation of the South (Texas, 1836; Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 1848). As we know it, the “Yankee empire” formally began with the intervention in the anti-colonial war in Cuba and the Philippines (1898-1902).
Towards the end of the 19th century, the power that never gave itself a proper name, usurped that of “America” to promote the “Pan-American Union” (1889), precursor of the Organization of American States (OAS, April 1948). A figment of the so-called Cold War, which Cuban Foreign Minister Raúl Roa rightly described as a “ministry of colonies”.
From the CIA’s mercenary invasion of Guatemala in 1954, to the coup in Bolivia in 2019, the OAS and the true “creole elites” validated their devious forms of “freedom” and “democracy”: disregard for the popular vote, military invasions, assassinations, genocides, interference, adventurers who proclaimed themselves “legitimate presidents” in a random square, and other outrages against the peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean.
Excluding the United States and Canada, CELAC was constituted in Mexico (Playa del Carmen, February 2010). And since nothing is perfect, it was inaugurated by President Felipe Calderón… In any case, the initiative was possible to achieve with statesmen convinced that, without unity, Latin America will continue to dig the economic and social hole in which it finds itself.
The promoters of CELAC (Hugo Chavez, Lula da Silva, Cristina Kirchner, Raul Castro, Evo Morales, Rafael Correa, Fernando Lugo) did not belong to the “elites”, but to the democratic will of their peoples.
Source: La Jornada, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English