The memorial ceremony held in Caracas
to commemorate the life of Hugo Chávez Frias on Friday was an international
event as well as a national moment of mourning and political transition. As I
watched the live Venevision webstreaming in the UK, I was drawn to reflect on
some of the historical parallels with the death and burials of Simón Bolívar, Chávez’s
historical lodestar. I have expressed some of these thoughts in piecemeal and
unsatisfactory fashion on various rolling news media over the last few days,
and this blog takes the form of developing some of ideas on the links and
comparisons between Chávez and Bolívar. It is also a first step towards a paper
I will be giving on 1 June 2013 at the ‘International Conference on War, Demobilization and Memory: The Legacy of War in the Era of Atlantic Revolutions at King’s College London (http://wdm.web.unc.edu/).
There have been many assessments of Chávez’s
achievements in office in the last week or so: it is not my intention to repeat
these here, nor to reflect on his possible political legacy in Venezuela, Latin
America or worldwide (I refer readers to the
reflections of Oscar Guardiola Rivera and Héctor Abad Faciolince). Many people have also written about the role of death and the rituals associated with it, in political cultures across the world, particularly in times of transition: I particularly like Katherine Verdery's 1999 book The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Post-Socialist Change.
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| An old image of the National Pantheon in Caracas, from http://caracas.ciberturista.com/files/2010/01/Panteon-Nacional-Caracas-Venezuela.jpg |
International attendance at Friday’s
memorial service appeared to demonstrate a markedly ideological pattern.
Bolivia, Iran, Brazil and Cuba were well represented. Argentina’s Cristina
Fernandez de Kirchner paid her respects but left before the ceremony on medical
advice. The U.S. sent two minor but sympathetic politicians, and Britain was
represented by its Ambassador to Venezuela.
In the days leading up to the
memorial service there was much media speculation as to where Chávez would be
buried. Opposition figures suggested, rather calumniously, that the immense new
mausoleum constructed to house the remains of Simón Bolívar in the centre of
Caracas, would now be adopted to shelter Chávez’s mortal remains alongside his
great hero. Others speculated that the convention establishing a minimum
twenty-five year waiting list for burial to the National Pantheon, might be
waived in the case of Hugo Chávez. The new mausoleum for Bolívar, which is an
annex to the existing National Pantheon, has attracted much media interest on
the basis of its size (it is huge), its shape (it looks like a skateboard ramp)
and its considerable cost. Bolivar’s remains have been in the National Pantheon
since the 1880s, when the former church was converted into a space of memory
dedicated to individuals who had given their lives in service to the Venezuelan
Republic.
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| Image of the new mausoleum to Bolivar, centre, from http://blogs.reuters.com/photographers-blog/files/2012/11/RTR3AHKL-e1353357870501.jpg |
In the National Pantheon, a statue to
Bolívar occupies the space of the altar, leaving el libertador to physically take over the space formerly occupied
by religion – this is as good an example as any of the way that
nineteenth-century nation-states in Latin America tried, in the century after
independence from Iberian colonial rule, to replace religious iconography of
King and Spain with patriotic martyrs and new national identities. In Venezuela,
as the historian Germán Carrera Damas showed long ago, the Cult of Bolivar (1969) fitted the bill and was taken up by politicians and generals
of all political ideologies from the mid-nineteenth century. Dedicating this church to Bolívar, placing statues of him across the country,
and calling Viva Bolívar at political
rallies: we might think that Hugo Chávez invented all of this, but the ‘cult of
Bolivar’ has been a centrepiece of Venezuelan political and cultural life for
over a hundred and fifty years. The historian Elias Pino Iturrieta showed more
recently how the historical Bolívar was stripped of his human flaws and presented by
latter-day Bolivarians as an infallible hero, predestined to bring liberty to
the continent (El divino Bolívar, 2005). Nevertheless, the ever-present focus on Bolívar as a subject of history writing
has necessarily brought out his multi-faced and contradictory character in
recent years – as a slaveowning abolitionist, for example, as a democrat who
flirted with authoritarianism, and as an anti-imperialist who courted the
leading empires of the day.
I have spent quite a lot of time in,
or trying to get into, the National Pantheon in Caracas over the last decade or
so. When Chávez won the presidency in 1998, and decided to rename the country
as the ‘Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela’, one of his aims was to renovate and
refurbish much of central Caracas and its historical monuments to the
independence era. Principal among its targets was the National Pantheon, which
consequently and ironically has often shut for refurbishments when I visited
from the nearby National Library, National Archive or the archive of the
Fundación John Boulton, which moved a few years ago into the colonial house
next door to the National Pantheon. Next to Bolivar’s statue lie the remains of
Daniel O’Leary, the Irishman who was Bolivar’s loyal aide-de-camp, and who in
later life became a historian who preserved and edited Bolivar’s correspondence
for publication (I have written previously about Daniel O’Leary’s own funeral,which took place in Bogota in Colombia in 1854, and which was – like Chávez’s,
like Bolivar’s – a moment where international and national agendas coincided
and were represented through death rituals). Also buried in the Pantheon,
alongside many Venezuelan presidents, writers, military officers and musicians,
are the Italian Carlo Castelli, the Prussian Heinrich Lutzen and the Venezuelan
Carmelo Fernandez, who had all fought under Daniel O’Leary at the Battle of El
Santuario in 1829 – the subject of my last book. There are other British remains buried there too, testament to the legacy of
the British and Irish involvement in Venezuelan independence – Charles Minchin
and Thomas Green are two of those who names are recorded. I spent many hours
scanning the plaques in the naves for mention of General Gregor MacGregor, a
Scottish adventurer who served Venezuela’s armed forces and who died in Caracas
in 1845. I found none. MacGregor was a charismatic, controversial figure with
radical views and a love of new challenges: I suspect that he and Hugo Chávez
would have got on quite well.
But Hugo Chávez and Gregor MacGregor
will not, it seems now, be sharing adjacent resting places. The day before the
president’s funeral, his deputy, Nicolás Maduro, declared that Chávez’s body
would be embalmed so that they could remain on view ‘for eternity’, placed in a
new Museum of the Revolution in central Caracas, several blocks away from
Bolivar’s mausoleum. Maduro compared this to the preservation of Lenin or Mao’s
remains, displayed for the enjoyment of party loyalists or curious tourists.
But a permanent location for the display is still a very long way off, and the
presidential election on 14 April, in which Maduro will most likely face off
against Henrique Capriles, defeated last year by Chávez, means that Maduro’s
decision could well still be overturned by a new president. It seems pretty
moot whether Maduro’s commitment to embalming would be honoured by a new
government run by anti-Chavistas.
Two
weeks ago, Hugo Chávez returned from Cuba to Venezuela, a trip he had made on
repeated occasions during his cancer treatment, for the last time. His funeral
took place within a fortnight. In contrast, twelve years had to pass between Simón
Bolívar’s death in Santa Marta, Colombia, in 1830, and the repatriation of his
remains to Caracas in 1842. On March 1, 1830, Bolívar had resigned the
presidency of Gran Colombia (the super-republic comprising the republics we
know today as Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador and Panama), later declaring that
“he who serves the revolution ploughs the sea.” Sick, disenchanted, and
disillusioned he prepared to go into exile but died before he could leave Gran
Colombia, on December 17, 1830.
For ten
years after Bolivar’s death his friends were in exile across the Caribbean, or
slowly reintegrating themselves into political and economic life through civil
warfare and political violence. In the years 1839–42 Venezuela finally
experienced a period of peace presided over by its dominant national caudillo
José Antonio Páez, the overwhelming victor in the presidential elections of
late 1838. Páez’s cabinet was stacked with former Bolivarians. As the leader of
a government representing what Venezuelan historians call oligarchic
conservatism, Páez and his ministers proposed and enacted measures that they
thought would integrate the republic into the modern, prosperous world, for
example, private road-building schemes, national schools, immigration, and
repayment of the national debt. With Guillermo Smith in the Finance (and later,
also, Foreign Affairs) Ministry Venezuela’s progress was firmly tied to British
power in these years. In Daniel O’Leary’s words, “General Paez has always shewn a desire to cultivate
the friendship of England in preference to any other country.” One of the last acts of Paez’s administration, as
he sought to improve its popularity to ensure the election of his nominated
successor, Carlos Soublette, was to arrange the repatriation of the remains of Simón
Bolívar.
The
Repatriation of Bolívar’s Remains from Santa Marta to Caracas
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| One of Carmelo Fernandez's sketches of Bolivar's funeral procession, from https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEicITMS0k6aHOLUEkCqcuU0KlyyutbbMAh8jKQ7v1-ZWzQx1OXx162b3VEghAal71PyVgOGr9AgKpgwR0DuyDHFLVhEx-VfnV_4zLHTYfoBP0mik5HVKvpawhw8pDp1rGD80uJhbRxy818/s1600/Funeral_Bolivar.jpg. |
The following discussion of the historical national and international contexts of the first exhumation of Bolivar's remains comes from my recent book The Struggle for Power in Post-Independence Colombia and VenezuelaWith the consolidation of power in the early 1840s of Conservative
regimes in both New Granada (under General Herrán) and Venezuela (under General
Páez) came the rehabilitation of the memory of Simón Bolívar. The repatriation
of Bolívar’s remains from Santa Marta to the Venezuelan capital in 1842
provided an opportunity for the two governments to wallow in nostalgia for an
apparently lost and glorious past. The staging of the repatriation was notably
and consciously Eurocentric. The Italian Agustín Codazzi was commissioned to
design and build, in Paris, a carriage that would carry the urn containing
Bolívar’s remains, as well as “a Victory Arch to adorn the solemn act.” Daniel
O’Leary was charged with communicating with the Italian sculptor Pietro
Tenerani, who was to create, in Rome, a marble monument where the remains would
lie. Some of the friends who had
been with Bolívar in his last days were also invited, including Alejandro
Próspero Reverend, the French doctor who had treated Bolívar. A new urn was
commissioned to be made in Bogotá to carry Bolívar’s remains to Caracas, though
Bolívar’s heart was to be left in Santa Marta “as a symbol of eternal
friendship between the two countries.” Daniel
O’Leary was at the time British consul in Puerto Cabello and acting consul in
Caracas. It was Daniel O’Leary’s idea that a British warship should be sent to Santa
Marta to assist in transferring Bolívar’s remains. The
Venezuelan mission sailed for Santa Marta accompanied by the esteemed artist
and El Santuario veteran Carmelo Fernández. Throughout the journey Fernández
drew 18 sketches of the expedition’s progress.
The governor of Santa Marta in 1842
was Joaquín Posada Gutierrez. In his memoirs he recalled that the Venezuelan
commissioners arrived at Santa Marta not on their own ship the Constitución, but in La Circe, the French corvette that had
in theory been accompanying them. This was a suitable beginning for a
multinational event where the British and French, especially, were ever
present. Posada Gutierrez welcomed the commissioners ashore with a speech
evoking the memory of Bolívar, “the man whose fame filled the world.” When the
marble stone was lifted away from the grave, the foreign and national warships
in the harbor (the Venezuelan
Constitución and brig Caracas, HMS Albatross, the French corvette La Circe, the Dutch sloop Venus, and the Danish sloop Sainte Croix) all began regular
cannon-fire to mark the occasion. The exhumation of the remains attracted
interest from invited guests and locals alike, who all crowded for a glimpse.
The funeral convoy to the port the next day was made up of “all the honourable
individuals, regardless of colour” who were in the town and “five or six
thousand people” waved goodbye to the relics on November 22, 1842, when they
began the 21-day journey from Santa Marta to the port of La Guaira. O’Leary
joined the “magnificent” cortege from La Guaira over the mountain to Caracas on
December 15, and he walked with the diplomatic community on December 17 when
Bolívar’s remains were taken into the San Francisco church. They lay there for seven
days before moving on December 23 to the cathedral. Dreaming that even in death
Bolívar would once again unite people despite their diverse origins or
politics, O’Leary noted that “every one seemed desirous that party spirit
should be buried in the Tomb of Bolívar.” He reported to London that “the British and Foreign naval officers who
attended the funeral rites have been treated with great hospitality.”
From the moment of their arrival in
Caracas, Bolívar’s remains were subject to the most pompous and exaggerated
accompaniment. The head of state, ministers, generals, the diplomatic
community, and “thousands of well-wishers” turned out to the streets. Rafael
Urdaneta, at the time the governor of Guayana, recalled that “the foreign
residents of Caracas and La Guaira, filled with the same enthusiasm as the
locals, had joined in the preparations and mixed in the lines wearing national
uniforms.” President José Antonio Páez presided over the ceremonies in one of
the last acts of his presidential term. The representatives of foreign powers, such as O’Leary, were to bear
witness to Venezuela’s modernity and the honours it paid to Bolívar.
For O’Leary, the repatriation of
Bolívar’s remains to Venezuela had taken place under British guidance and with
British approval. This was only right and proper in O’Leary’s opinion, given
that (as he had written in 1841) Britain’s only “desire [was] to maintain with
[Venezuela . . .] the most friendly relations, without aiming at exclusive
advantages or pretending to establish any undue influence in the country.” The
beginning of the rehabilitation of Bolívar’s memory was proof for O’Leary that
he, his friends and Bolívar had been right all along, that a strong, central
government supported by European imperial powers was the only way to preserve
the republic.
Using History to Look Forwards: Hugo Chávez and the Death of Simón
Bolívar
Even as Latin American leaders look
to the future, they often ground their political discourse, and the way they look at
the world, upon their countries’ historical pasts. One good example is the way
the mortal remains of Simón Bolívar have been treated and debated in
contemporary Venezuela. Bolivar’s remains (excluding his heart, which
stayed back in Santa Marta, Colombia, after his first exhumation in 1842) lie
in what is now the National Pantheon in the centre of Caracas, which was
consecrated as such in the 1870s under the watchful eye of the caudillo Antonio
Guzman Blanco. Guzman Blanco is famed for his attempts to modernise Venezuela,
to overhaul its urban planning in the model of Von Hausman’s Paris, and for his
populist authoritarianism. Guzman Blanco gave the definitive shift to the
Bolivarian cult, erecting statues, renaming avenues, and orchestrating the
publication of the 32 volumes of Bolivarian documentation. Whereas in the 1870s
the National Pantheon occupied a secluded, rural setting in between urban
Caracas and the northern mountain range separating it from the Caribbean – and
with an awe-inspiring view of the city, combining peace and tranquillity with
scope and horizon –it has now been fully overtaken by urban development, and
now looks onto a concrete plaza and series of dual carriageway flyovers.
Despite frequent architectural makeovers, on the inside and outside, the
Pantheon still feels like a hangover from another, more patriotic era that had
been left behind by urbanisation and development. The new architectural gesture
of the mausoleum dedicated to Bolívar now stands behind it, looking down its
graceful slopes disapproving at the Pantheon’s colonial rigidity. Inside,
Bolivar’s remains have seldom been left to rest in peace.
In the
last decade the tomb of Bolívar enclosed within the National Pantheon has been
visited by luminaries including Vladimir Putin, Evo Morales and Lula da Silva,
as Chávez has made it into a unmissable stopping point on a Bolivarian tour of
the capital. In 2010 much of Hispanic America marked the bicentenary of its
separation from Spanish colonial rule. Although the first declarations of
independence had been issued in 1809 (in Quito, Ecuador, and Cartagena,
Colombia) and other regions first declared their separation in 1811 – including
Venezuela, 1810 was chosen as the year in which the continent as a whole would
come together to celebrate the end of colonialism. Of course – and I write as
someone who participated in many of the historical symposia, conferences and
lectures that took place in Europe and the Americas to mark the date – the
whole thing was a largely arbitrary excuse for diverse administrations to spend
money on celebrations and events that, they hoped, would shore up their own
popularity and legitimacy. 1810 was chosen because Mexico, the largest country
with the most money to throw at the celebrations at the time, had a clear event
and date to mark: the 1810 Grito de Dolores issued by the priest Miguel Hidalgo
(Mexico did not achieve independence until eleven years later, and even then it
was through negotiation with the departing rulers, rather than through military
victory – so expect further parties in 2021).
In 2011, Venezuela organised a wide array of projects to celebrate its
own bicentenary – though, as with Mexico, independence had only been assured a
decade later, with the 1819 battle of Carabobo, the bicentenary of which Chávez
had pledged to attend, as president, in 2019. To commemorate 1811, historical
research projects were funded, entire barrios repainted, health centres opened,
and political battles waged, all in the name of independence. Political murals
festooned urban walls, and banners hung from the balconies of public buildings,
all declaring the ongoing urgency of maintaining Venezuela’s independence. In
2011, in Caracas, I witnessed the major night-time parade organised by the
government, in which two hundred years of history were synthesised into a three
hour rolling, acrobatic, choreographed and orchestrated tableau, ranging from
the heroes of independence and their heroism, through the discovery of oil and
the subsequent struggles of unionised workers. I have never seen so many
fireworks, or roller skates, in my life. This was a revolutionary history,
publicly funded, massively televised and disseminated, in which Bolívar kicked
open the door that became a national, proud and ongoing history. It is part of
a staunchly revisionist project which has little time for the niceties of
traditional historical interpretation, and a great appreciation of the value of
symbolic gestures in linking history to the daily revolutionary programme of
overhauling Venezuelan society. In early 2010, for example, Chávez and
President Rafael Correa of Ecuador presided over a ceremony in which the
supposed remains of Manuela Saenz, Bolivar’s lover, were buried in the National
Pantheon. Nobody at the time tried to hide the fact that Saenz had been buried,
in 1856, in a mass, pauper’s grave in Paita, northern Ecuador, and that it was
most likely that none of the earth being so honoured in Caracas in 2010 had any
physical link to her. However, the symbolic gesture reached beyond the
particles to display a continental and gendered appreciation for the sacrifices
of independence – which played well in Chávez’s popular constituencies. The BBC
cited a Chávez supporter, a student called
Silvester Montillo, who explained his reasons for supporting the earlier effort
to exhume and celebrate Manuela Saenz, Bolivar’s lover: "Some people have
criticised the government for spending money on this," he said. "But
they don't understand what it stands for. It doesn't matter to us whether there
are traces of her DNA in the urn or not. What's important is that Manuela Saenz
represents the history of Venezuela and the history of all Latin America”.
The
Death of Bolivar
Ever
since his election as president in 1998, and with increasing prominence in the
wake of the 2002 attempted coup against him, Hugo Chávez liked to mention in
his public addresses that Bolívar might not have died, in 1830, of the drawn-out
battle against tuberculosis that he lost under the care of a French doctor,
Alexandre Prospero Reverend, on the Caribbean coast of Colombia, in Santa
Marta. Instead, Chávez speculated, Bolívar might have been the victim of
poisoning; and that poisoning might have originated in Bolivar’s political
enemies – and those enemies might have been foreigners – like Dr Reverend – and
even might have been from the U.S.A. A team of U.S. scientists led by Paul
Auwaerter of Johns Hopkins University examined the case in 2010, and published
their findings in a scholarly journal (Paul G. Auwaerter, John Dove, and Philip A. Mackowiak, ‘Simón Bolívar’s Medical Labyrinth: An Infectious Diseases Conundrum’, Clinical Infectious Diseases 2011;52(1):78–85). They noted that arsenic poisoning was
indeed a possibility, and that this may have come from the water system in
Lima, Peru, where Bolívar lived for a year in 1825-6. Like a posthumous game of
Cluedo, it really might have been the lead piping. Alternative explanations
posited include the arsenic having been contained in a medical remedy.
On 15
July 2010, Bolivar’s coffin was opened up in a ceremony with Chávez in
attendance without fanfare, subsequently broadcast on national television in an
interlude of the president’s television show Aló Presidente. Chávez told his audience that when he stood next to
Bolivar’s remains, with the coffin opened, the words of the poet Pablo Neruda
came to him: ‘Father, is it you, or isn’t it you, or who are you?’. (In
Neruda’s poem Canto general (1950), Bolívar replies ‘It is me, and I awaken every one hundred years,
when the people awaken’). Chávez
commented that opening the coffin was ‘a sublime moment directed straight at
the heart of our nation’s soul’. He told viewers that when he visited the
Pantheon that time, he remembered Bolivar’s last words: ‘If my death
contributes to consolidating union [in our country] I will go calmly down into
my grave’. Chávez confessed that he whispered to Bolivar’s remains: ‘Good
Venezuelans are building that union you wanted, so that one day you can rest in
peace’. Before showing the images on television, Chávez contrasted this public
gesture with the previous occasions when Bolivar’s remains had been
disinterred, for the private benefit and enjoyment only of the governing elites
and their friends. Observing from afar, it was clear to me that Chávez understood his
actions as revolutionising the similar exhumations undertaken by previous
regimes. His actions were legitimated, he argued, by being in the name of the
people – facilitated by the television pictures that enabled the exhumation to
be viewed across the nation. On the film, Chávez was heard to say ‘Viva Bolívar.
It is not a skeleton. It’s the Great Bolívar, who has returned’. He later tweeted ‘Bolívar has not died, we are his
children’ (Quotes, and translations, from The Scotsman, 16 July 2010).
A final report on the exhumation was announced, as
promised, in July 2011, in the week in which I was in Caracas participating in
a week of events to commemorate Britain’s involvement in Venezuela’s
independence. The President could not hide his disappointment at the ambiguity
of the final report, which concluded that Bolívar might not have died of
tuberculosis, but that the tests which had been performed could not confirm or
deny any cause. Chávez announced that he would continue believing that Bolívar might have been
poisoned, reported in Ultimas Noticias and El Universal, 28 July 2011). We can assume that popular memory in Venezuela continues to share some doubt
over the causes of Bolivar’s death.
The Death of Hugo Chávez
Over the last two years, it has been
well known across the world that Hugo Chávez was receiving treatment for
cancer, in Cuba, that was attacking his pelvic region. Whilst the government
released regular health/recovery updates, the opposition complained that they
were receiving insufficient detail about the president’s condition, and the
nature of the cancer from which he was suffering. This was particularly the
case during the election campaign of late 2012, when the president’s poor
health made him slow down his traditional national travelling and campaigning,
and therefore become a recurrent theme of the campaign itself. When he returned
to Venezuela in February 2013 there was some word that he had recovered his
health, but much stronger rumours that the Cuban doctors had decided that
nothing more could be done. Given the speed with which global communications
networks function, it has not taken long for doubts over the nature of Chávez’s
condition, and the cause and timing of his death, to surface. The Cuban blogger
Yoani Sanchez has suggested that the Cuban government manipulated Chávez’s
death in order to maximise the sentiment and melodrama of the announcement of
his death, and subsequent funeral, suggesting even that Chávez may have died in Cuba. The ABC newspaper in Spain, never renowned
for its objective reporting of Venezuelan affairs in recent years, ventured
that because Chávez was not seen alive in public after his return from Cuba, he
must have been dead upon arrival. It might be noted that Chávez himself, and
his successor Nicolás Maduro, played their own parts in promoting scurrilous
gossip about his illness. Both alleged – Maduro in the days after Chávez’s
death – that the CIA or other United States agencies had formed part of a plot
to poison Latin American leftist leaders with cancer. Already we can see the
faultlines emerging of a dispute over the causes and timing of Chávez’s death
that will have as much to do with political expediency as medical accuracy.
Some Conclusions
During
his period in presidential office, Hugo Chávez and his advisors worked to a
well defined plan to associate themselves with a revolutionised image of Simón
Bolívar, which they hoped cement themselves as the legitimate rulers of a
popular, democratic Venezuela. Clear continuities can be detected between that
plan, and the aims of the so-called oligarchy that ran Venezuela in 1842 under
Jose Antonio Paez, at the time of the first exhumation of Simón Bolívar.
The
exhumation of Bolívar might also encourage us to reflect on the nature of Bolívar
as the outstanding dead body of the independence period. Repeated attempts to
dig up, recloth and rebury Bolívar speak to the absolute centrality of Bolívar in
Venezuelan nationality, the result of a century and a half’s conspicuous,
deliberate myth-creation. Bolivar’s remains were repatriated twelve years after
his death, the National Pantheon was designed around his body thirty years
later, and even one hundred and eighty years after his death, scientists were
still opening up his coffin and testing the contents of his bones and the
remaining materials which might once have formed a part of his body. The
decision to embalm Hugo Chávez, and leave him on display ‘eternally’, certainly
feels at the time of writing to be an act of political opportunism on the part
of Nicolás Maduro as much as a gesture of national gratitude. Of more
significance, however, are the long historical parallels with the death,
burials and exhumations of Simón Bolívar. Given these parallels, and the ways
in which Bolivar’s reputation has been used by governments of diverse political
persuasions in the years since his death, it might be expected that Hugo Chávez’s
mortal remains might not expect to rest in peace for many years to come.
Like Bolívar, Chávez came as
President to represent the hopes of the majority of the people he governed.
They were both army officers who embraced democracy and recognised the
importance of a country’s history in shaping its contemporary identity and its
relationship with the world. Chávez saw himself as building on the foundations
constructed by Bolívar, which allowed him to redistribute wealth, build
alliances across continents and globally, and work to reduce poverty in South
America, long held to be the most unequal continent in the world. Compared to those goals, the question of where his mortal remains will lie, is of relatively little importance.
Further
down, the signs of early gentrification begin with street art and a
cafe or two. At the end of Carrera I moved on to Blanco Encalada, Chile’s first
naval hero who was moved aside upon the arrival of Lord Cochrane in 1818, when
the Scotsman became the first head of the Chilean navy despite Blanco
Encalada’s previous experience and national origins. B.E.’s road is a wide
boulevard with racing traffic lined by the sturdy buildings of the Universidad
de Chile. From here I entered the Parque O’Higgins.
During the c.19 this was the Parque Cousiño, and it
was here that Santiago’s first games of football were played, next to the
racecourses of the Club Hipico. On this Saturday afternoon families relaxed
after lunch, teenagers gaggled and couples embraced. There was little football
being played, so I walked through the park, and turned back on myself up
Avenida Manuel Rodriguez. M.R. was an ally of the Carrera brothers, another
whose heroics in the early stage of independence were recalled by later
radicals who wanted to achieve real freedom a century after independence. M.R’s
road is a massive dirty racetrack sliced through by the new metro line that
stops nearby at the Parque O’Higgins stop. I trekked northwards and quickly
came across, tucked into the corner of the Parque O’Higgins, the Santiago Lawn
Tennis Club, founded 4 November 1904. Inside, I asked permission to take a
photo, and was referred by the car park attendant to the grounds attendant to,
finally, the administrator, Hector Garrido. Hector kindly showed me round the
12 clay courts and the mock-Tudor-English-chalet-style clubhouse, purpose built
in 1910 for the club, whose first director was Sir Gerald Lowther. After an
agreeable chat about the history of tennis in Chile and its present decline (as
we spoke Chile were being dumped out of the Davis Cup World Group I by the
Dominican Republic, though there was a football match on the clubhouse’s tv) I
headed back onto the trail of the history of independence. I wanted to reach the
Scottish hero of independence: Lord Cochrane.
Guillermo – who had returned to Chile
from exile in Brazil a decade ago and spoke Spanish with a Brazilian accent and
English showing the signs of the cassettes that had taught him - and I spent
half an hour under the sign, discussing conspiracy theories about Chilean
politics, and the history of Chilean Independence. The split between Carrera
and O’Higgins of two centuries ago, Guillermo contends, is the same chasm that still
separates left and right, impulse and order, passion and force, in the
twenty-first century. He is neither Carrerista nor O’Higginista. We separated
the best of friends.
Guillermo – who had returned to Chile
from exile in Brazil a decade ago and spoke Spanish with a Brazilian accent and
English showing the signs of the cassettes that had taught him - and I spent
half an hour under the sign, discussing conspiracy theories about Chilean
politics, and the history of Chilean Independence. The split between Carrera
and O’Higgins of two centuries ago, Guillermo contends, is the same chasm that still
separates left and right, impulse and order, passion and force, in the
twenty-first century. He is neither Carrerista nor O’Higginista. We separated
the best of friends.
With that, casting a glance at the 20m high photo of Salvador
Allende that overlooks the statue, at last I reached don José. His equestrian
figure is mounted so high that it is barely possible to photograph it. San Martín and his steed, in conventional, epic pose, are looking over the city and towards the Andes. He is racing from Bolívar’s statue, where I started my walk, just a few blocks further west. The Liberator is reaching for the sky, flying from the
streets of Santiago, leaving Chile to its own heroes, conflicts, politics and
memories. The streets retain that history much better than any statue.
