Ungovernable for Us ( Simón Bolivar)
by Israel Centeno
The roots of violence in Latin America.
In order to talk about violence, the expression of natural elements, and the human condition — as I shall do in this series of columns — certain parameters must first be established. I could write numerous paragraphs on the search for the causes of all wars, massacres, and genocides recorded throughout history; on universal outbreaks of war; on the disappearance of stars; on Sodom and Gomorrah, Pompeii, Persepolis, Tenōchtitlān, or Atlantis, but I would not know where to stop.
The word itself is complex.
It’s vast.
But in search of something measurable, i.e. the scenarios upon which our thoughts could have an influence, we find that such scenarios can be divided up. Thinkers across the ages have focused much of their efforts on trying to understand their societies; the Greeks philosophized their cities and their citizens. Desert tribal leaders followed rules for their wars and turned to the commandments to impose them. We could consider peace to have always followed tribulation and violence. For instance, after the Greco-Persian warsand the main conquests of the empire, there was Greek peace, then Roman peaceand, after that, the many other periods of peace that we have known.
Peace is necessary for us to understand ourselves under a system of law. Peace is like order. Order that is structured around specific institutions that legislate and mete out justice; order that is administered either by citizens, a sole leader, or a vertical and indisputable institution, such as the clergy, a party, or the military.
Bearing these considerations in mind, along with a few quotations, the subject of violence in Latin America can be tackled. Though this may be somewhat ambitious.
It is said that Latin America is united by a common tongue and a common history, but, moving beyond that cliché, there is, at the very least, a considerable lack of awareness between her nations. We consider the other countries our relatives, but they’re only distant relatives about whom we know little.
To start, we could note our similarities: Violence unites us. The manner in which we were conquered, the way the vast territory was occupied by the municipal order of town councils, general headquarters, and viceroyalties who sent back reports to a faraway metropolis. The Spanish peace. Independencecame next and, as a consequence of the dissolution, disagreement, which was followed by the hegemonic attempts of Gran Colombiaand Pan-Americanism to unite the independent Hispanic world as a great nation under single rule — a dream that persists even today. Instead, from the reaffirmation of regional identities sprung numerous republics, overseen in practically all cases by the military. Institutionally weak and constantly threatened by internal and external interests, these new republics were unstable and telluric. It is here that I remember the first paragraph of a masterful story by Roberto Bolaño.
A first paragraph that is a stigma on Latin America.
It is the first paragraph of “El Ojo Silva” (Silva The Eye).
Likewise, similar imagery can be found in Gabriel García Márquez’s novel Cien años de soledad(One Hundred Years of Solitude): The children of colonel Aureliano Buendía are all marked with Ash Wednesday crosses on their foreheads. All are killed.
In Mario Vargas Llosa’s novel La guerra del fin del mundo(The War of the End of the World), a holy man and a messiah known as the Counselor use fanaticism to humanize the marginalized, disowned, anonymous, and ostracized people of the deserted backcountry.
In a letter from General Simon Bolívaraddressed to General Juan José Flores, Bolivar, the destroyer of an empire and the inspirer and constructor, to a large extent, of a new reality, announced, bitterly and with an inevitable skepticism, the failure of his endeavor: “America is ungovernable for us.” With this premise, he created a kind of commandment that would tragically condemn the future of the nations that his will, his arm, and his military made possible. Few have paid proper attention to this realistic and human letter, even though many have wasted time on delusions of glory.
With these images, with these constants, I shall continue to reach conclusions regarding violence, primarily in my country, with something approaching coherence, leaving my knowledge and my dynamic and intellectual investigations behind, before going on to consider violence in terms of other fields that are closer to my heart.
A history of violence in Venezuela — bloodshed and cruelty, past and present.
While back, I read an essay by Francisco Herrera Luqueon violence in Venezuela, which attempts to explain the country’s high crime rates by referring back to the times of the Spanish conquest. It works on the idea that those who came to “civilize us” were, to a large extent, people who had been exiled — criminals and outcasts. They weren’t the great men of the Golden Age, but those who had been excluded from Catholic Spain, those who had no place in the hierarchy being established throughout Europe, the last Roman empire, the sacrosanct bastion of Catholicism. Those who were excluded brought their scourges with them, the things that had dehumanized them during the Roman revival in Madrid.
According to Herrera Luque in Los Viajeros de Indias, these men without assets, who’d been stripped of all their dignity and land, transferred their resentment, their reactive responses to the harsh reality of life, and their difficulties in recognizing themselves as part of any race, lineage, or class, to the new world. Simply, they were hungry for anything that would restore their dignity and integrate them into the world from which they had been expelled: Gold, power, or violent crime. This would be achieved by the strongest, most able man, the greatest law-breaker, someone who, on behalf of all the outcasts, would spit in the faces of those who had banished them. They were bandits, poorly behaved soldiers, misers of all kinds, traffickers; the descendants of Cain, bearing his mark.
Through these conclusions, as I recall, Herrera Luque attempts to explain one form of violence, a form of violence for which, in those early years, at the end of the 1960s, there were already alarming statistics. He compares Venezuelan violence to Salvadoran violence, two nations with similar demographic characteristics and similar displays of cruelty in their acts of violence.
I will now attempt to change the direction of the discourse in a slight and indiscernible way. I shall look once more to history, but instead develop an idea. In our nations the civil-military concept has always been present at moments of historical change. Let us consider the Patriotic Society of Caracas, who forced the Declaration of Independence. The society was made up of landowners’ sons, all military colonels who had lived in Europe and were influenced by the cruel and idealistic Jacobinsof the French Revolution and by Napoleon Bonaparte’s accession, conquests, and triumphs against kings anointed by divine right.
Some budding intellectuals and young gentlemen of high society from the city at the centre of the Captaincy Generalwere the most radical, imposing criteria, based on the idea of the Cortes, in defense of the usurped rights of Ferdinand VII. “Are not three hundred years of calm enough?” exclaimed the young colonel, Simon Bolívar. Thus he rose against the peace of the Spanish order, which had made his own family prosperous over a long period of time. He would go on to break apart this institution without being entirely certain about what the institutions that would reunite the newly independent nations would involve. He had a few romantic notions, as referred to in the discourse of Angostura , based upon the model of the liberal republics of North America and the experiences of the French.
We must take a brief look at these realities in order to understand the present day. Willpower backed by weapons and the will of a civil élite embodies independence from Spain. At least in Venezuela, it was achieved by a minority who ostracized the faceless multitudes, an amalgam of people who did not feel represented by their liberators, including various groups who were excluded from the patriotic project: Blacks, people of mixed-race such as the pardosandzambos , Canary Islanders, and peninsular Spanish (derogatorily referred to as blancos de orillaby their liberators). These marginalized groups rose up in arms against their redeemers and were humanized once more, holding the fanatical bias that characterized the outcasts towards caudillosand strong men who, in the name of Spain, managed to vanquish the liberal landowners and, with neither homeland nor king, would secure the reign of chaos for years to come.
The Venezuelan War of Independencethus became a civil war, a war between people of the same country, in an anarchic and cruel situation that claimed the lives of two thirds of the population. We were born into this reality, we came from this reality, and, as independent republics, bearing the cross of ash on our foreheads, we are unable to escape the violence or set up governments that can guarantee long-lasting peace. We spent the 19th century in this reality, caught between revolts and guerrilla fighters, banditry, and the self-centered ambitions for power of heirs to independence, always using the name of the Liberator to wash away the bloodstains of barbarities.
Institutions, history, and the peace-less cycle of violence in Latin America.
.All violence is justified in Latin America by means of increasingly vague and distorted legends of heroism. For example, the drug lord Pablo Escobar, head of the Medellín cartel, was considered by his people to be a liberator, a modern day Robin Hood, a rebel against the oligarchy.
Nobody even looks at the words of the manwho lost his hero status once he faced his failure. The “few certain results,” the realistic inventory that Simon Bolívar listed in his letter to General Juan José Flores, have not been carefully considered — or, if they have, they were not deemed conducive to the promotion of “Bolívar the Liberator” as the center of a secular religion, as the icon that justifies each of our intentions and inanities, as the spiritual leader of all our individual and collective dreams. It is frustrating. The “certain results” that Bolívar inventoried should constitute a legitimate limit, a legacy, yet they’re rarely used to promote the idea of citizenship. Instead, the call of “we shall fight to the death” will always prevail over any concept that could distance us from the war cry.
The failure of our political modernization projects brings with it the impossibility of economic modernization. These both lead to the prevalence of violence in all fields and spaces. We have spent decades talking about democracy — insulting it or defending it — yet, in truth, very few of our nations can honestly say that they have been able to sustain full democracies. Instead, they blur the concept of a settlement or population to make room for the notion of citizenship. Many of us even call ourselves democrats and, indeed, we manage some of the theory behind democracy, but the temptation to save face means we always end up as men of honor, true women, exceptional individuals. However, when the truth is considered in absolute terms, we find ourselves deeper in the territories of fanaticism and violence than in those of a modern democracy. In many of our countries, freedom hasn’t failed, because it was never there in the first place. Similarly, the aim of delivering equality to our populations hasn’t failed, because there never was such an intention. Democracy hasn’t failed, because we’ve confused its institutions with palaces where power is flaunted and abused. Over the course of two hundred years of history, the violence inherited from our wars of liberation has worn different masks, gone by many names, been described in various ways and ridden the horses of many leaders. Emancipation has not yet come to an end; it’s a matter that must still be resolved. It is a simple cycle: Once the original cause is betrayed — and it is always betrayed — someone is then predestined to defend it. Our inability to achieve a long-lasting order of freedom has been painted over with various layers of nationalism and ideology. And now we are naked, still living in post-war aridity, justifying the aftermath and searching for new figures to give us humanity and direction, calling it an uprising, a revolution, a hunger for justice and democracy. But, in the end, it’s the same as always. We seek an outside source to blame, something distant, to avoid the disgrace of realizing that we are the accomplices and executioners, forging our own ill-fated reality over the years.
I was tempted, in a first draft of this article, to delve into certain personal experiences, since, in some ways, I am much like the protagonist of Roberto Bolaño’s story “El Ojo Silva”: I belong to his generation and yes, I was born into violence. I wanted to do it because I feared that I “couldn’t escape without being called a coward or a traitor,” but once I reviewed my thoughts on the subject, I felt uncomfortable. It was necessary to rebel against the stigma, the stigmata of violence. A citizen doesn’t desert or betray; he changes his mind, he thinks differently. He doesn’t have to show courage in anything other than the daily defense of his civility and his rights, and he should begin by learning that he has such rights. When all is said and done, in this unfortunate continent, our saviors are usually the founding and re-founding fathers of the nation, yet none are or have been good fathers to their children. Perhaps this is one of the most dramatic causes of exclusion and violence, and has led to the denial of any right to peace.
