White Americans Fail to Address Their Family Histories

[old as dirt]

86. Simon Bolivar, democracy, and the bandits of Patia

It's hard to find anything about my wife's culture in any English source. Here's a fun little paragraph involving democracy, Simón Bolívar, and my wife's ancestors (ie: the bandits of Patía).

Myths of Harmony: Race and Republicanism during the Age of Revolution, Colombia 1795-1831

by Marixa Lasso (2007)

https://www.scribd.com/document/447078042/tegsnb-pdf

https://www.amazon.com/Myths-Harmony-Republicanism-Revolution-1795-1831/dp/0822959658

(pages 2-4)

In such nineteenth-century creole writings, modernity is the commendable aspiration of creole patriots and one of the principles justifying independence from Spain. Yet early narratives of the independence wars also contain some of the first denunciations of modern democratic politics as unsuitable for Spanish American societies. These texts did not condemn democracy per se, but rather its excesses. Simón Bolívar is perhaps the most influential representative of this tradition. His attacks on lawyers, demagogues, and incendiary theoreticians for their failure to grasp that modern politics could not be transferred to Spanish America without sufficient attention to local geography and culture are well known. What often goes unacknowledged is his influence on the development of an intellectual tradition that erased the contribution of the Spanish American popular classes in the history of modern democracy, making modernity seem a mere illusion of the elite. Bolívar sought to prove that fully representative politics did not suit South Americans. He created a dichotomy that distinguished between politically virtuous North Americans and South Americans, whose “character, habits and present enlightenment does not suit perfect representative institutions.” An “entirely popular system,” he insisted, was not appropriate for this region. He also cast local demands for popular and regional representation as the political pipedreams of a handful of enlightened lawyers. In his address to the Constitutional Congress of Angostura, he criticized the current constitution by reminding legislators that “not all eyes are capable of looking at the light of celestial perfection.” Representative democracy might belong in paradise, but not in South America. By making representative politics look like the exclusive aspiration of self-deluded lawyers, he detached the new constitutional governments from the societies that birthed them. This narrative’s legacy erased from historical memory local struggles over the nature of the new political system. Yet if Bolívar lashed out against lawyers’ inability to realize that liberal and perfect institutions did not fit the geography of Colombia, this was because he feared not that the popular classes would remain aloof from modern politics but that they would participate too much. As Germán Carrera Damas has shown, he feared that democracy in Spanish America could lead to the end of elite rule. He blamed lawyers for not understanding that representative institutions among do“the Caribes from the Orinoco, the sailors of Maracibo, the bogas [river boatmen] of Magdalena, the bandits of Patia . . . and all the savage hordes of Africa and America” would lead to Colombia’s ruin, perhaps to a second Haiti. In his famous “Jamaica Letter,” he noted that in Lima “the rich would not tolerate democracy, and the slaves and pardos would not tolerate aristocracy.” Years later, he would warn José Antonio Paez against changing Colombia’s republican system, arguing that “the height and brilliance of a throne would be frightful. Equality would be broken and los colores [the colored classes] could see all their rights lost to a new aristocracy.” Future interpretations of Bolívar would tend to forget the strong linkage between pardos and democracy in his writings. Mostly remembered instead is his attack on lawyers’ inability to comprehend local society.