| Redressing Simon Bolivar's history |
|
|
|
Venezuela's President rewrites the history of his hero Feb.15.- 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 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” ... [ full text ] |
