These passages from chapters seven and nine of Marie Arana’s incredible biography of Simon Bolivar, because I’m tracking the way the book tackles race in the context of revolution. (I revisit this book every summer because it’s one of my favorites. The South American story is so different from the North American story, largely because of the role that race played):
“…It soon became clear to Bolívar, especially after the first pitched battle of his career at Araure on December 4, 1813, that although he might triumph—as he did, and brilliantly—his army simply couldn’t recruit soldiers as quickly and effectively as the enemy. For every thrashing the republicans could deliver, the Legions of Hell would come hurtling back like the mythical Hydra, with ever more heads and a greater fury. The reason for this was obvious, although republicans were slow to see its significance: the Spanish had race on their side. The vast majority of the nation’s people—black, Indian, mixed-blood—were acting on age-old democratic impulse. They were joining an effort to squelch the people of privilege, level the classes. But it was a narrow interpretation of democracy, promoted by Spanish generals, and blind to the revolutionary struggle at hand. The colored masses understood that the world was unjust, that the Creoles who lorded over them were rich and white, but they hadn’t understood the true pyramid of oppression. They hadn’t factored that the roots of misery were in empire, that Spain had constructed that unjust world carefully, that tyranny was rooted in the colonial, and that its system had been in place for over three hundred years (p. 153).
…In an irony few at the time appreciated, the royalist victory succeeded in toppling the social pyramid that Spain had been building for three hundred years. Overnight, Boves inverted the racial order: The colored, whom he perceived as loyal and trustworthy, were favored; the whites were treated as dangerous foes. To be Creole or Mantuano, for Boves, was tantamount to being a criminal. Only in Haiti had the lower classes achieved such a stunning reversal; but in Haiti the revolution—bloodily fought and won—had been undertaken in the name of freedom, not in the name of a king… It is difficult to overestimate the impact Boves had on Venezuelans, their revolution, the Americans they would become. It was he who first allowed blacks and Indians to imagine they could have a voice in the nation’s future. The Creole revolution had begun, after all, much like its North American version: as a movement that was of, by, and for whites. Boves changed that; the irony is that Spain saw potential in his racial war, and used it. Retrieved from the battlefield, his body was given an elaborate funeral in Urica; in time, it was mourned by Spanish priests throughout the land, most elaborately by that fanatical enemy of the revolution Archbishop Coll y Pratt (p. 164).
…This incontinent violence had not sprung spontaneously from the Venezuelan people; it was the calculated result of strategies put into place by two rival leaders who were intent on unnerving their enemies. Bolívar was not a truculent man: killing in cold blood sickened him. But he was well versed in the uses of fear. Boves, on the other hand, reveled in death. He had laughed to see an unborn child struggling for life in its dead mother’s belly; he took pleasure in watching a boy witness the mutilation of his father. It is said that Boves was eager to march on Cumaná precisely because his bloodlust had grown extreme. Whatever Boves’s and Bolívar’s intentions, the results of their policies were one and the same: the country stank of death; hospitals were overrun with invalids; populations were displaced; women were transferred from one place to another to care for the maimed and dying. The nation was devastated beyond recognition (p. 165).
…As Bolívar contemplated this reduced universe from a distant shore, he must have seen what was so clearly obvious: the uprising he had helped to kindle was unlike any other he had read about in the comfortable library of his old Spanish mentor, the Marquis of Ustaríz, and certainly like no revolution since. This was no uniform group of like-minded whites united by class and faith upending an oppressor and casting out an old system: it was no France or United States of America—or Haiti, for that matter—where strong commonalities existed among the rebels. The overwhelmingly mixed-race population of Latin America existed in few other societies, and it was a population too prevalent to ignore. A revolution would never succeed without engaging it. If Miranda had taught him that Creoles were profoundly afraid to confront the perilous questions of race in Spanish America, Boves had taught him that no war could be won without doing exactly that (pp. 165-166).
…Bolívar’s letter is a brilliant distillation of Latin America’s political reality. His people, he explains, are neither Indian nor pardos nor European, but an entirely new race, for which European models of government are patently unsuitable. Monarchies, to these Americans, were abhorrent by definition; and democracy—Philadelphia style—inappropriate for a population cowed and infantilized by three hundred years of slavery. “As long as we do not have the political virtues that distinguish our brothers of the north,” he argued, “a democratic system, far from rescuing us, can only bring us ruin. . . . We are a region plagued by vices learned from Spain, which, through history, has been a mistress of cruelty, ambition, meanness, and greed.” Most important to the welfare of these fledgling republics, Bolívar insisted, was a firm executive who employed wisdom, dispensed justice, and ruled benevolently for life. His America needed a strong, centralized government—one that addressed the people’s wretched condition, not a perfectly conceptualized, theoretical model dreamed up by idealists on some far-flung shore. But the “Letter from Jamaica” was more than mere propaganda; it was inspired prophecy. In it, Bolívar predicted that revolution-torn Mexico would opt for a temporary monarchy, which indeed it did. He pictured the loose confederation of nations that later became Central America. Given Panama’s “magnificent position between two mighty seas,” he imagined a canal. For Argentina, he foresaw military dictatorships; for Chile, “the blessings that flow from the just and gentle laws of a republic.” For Peru, he predicted a limbo in which privileged whites would not tolerate a genuine democracy, colored masses would not tolerate a ruling aristocracy, and the constant threat of rebellion was never far from hand. All these would come to pass. In some countries, one could even say, Bolívar’s visions still hold (pp. 176-177).
Venezuela, as Bolívar explained, like the rest of the Spanish American continent, was rent by a great many divisions—geographic, economic, human—and it would not be in congress’s interest to enact a government that ignored or exacerbated them. “Unity, unity, unity must be our motto!” he told them. But of all the nation’s challenges, the greatest was race:
Our people are nothing like Europeans or North Americans; indeed, we are more a mixture of Africa and America than we are children of Europe. . . . It is impossible to say with any certainty to which human race we belong. Most of our Indians have been annihilated; Spaniards have mixed with Americans and Africans; their children, in turn, have mixed with Indians and Spaniards. . . . we all differ visibly in the color of our skin: This diversity places upon us an obligation of the highest order. . . . We will require an infinitely firm hand and an infinitely fine tact to manage all the racial divisions in this heterogeneous society, where even the slightest alteration can throw off, divide, or undo its delicate balance.
It wasn’t that Spanish Americans were lesser stock; it was that they were a different stock altogether: a new kind of people, forged by three centuries of history, cruelly emasculated by Spain. “When a man loses his freedom,” Homer had said, and Bolívar quoted him now, “he loses half his spirit.” Codes and statutes were insufficient for a populace laboring under the triple yoke of ignorance, tyranny, and vice; what was needed was wise, considered leadership. It was incumbent on congress to fashion a new kind of government for this new race of man—one capable of governing and nurturing at the same time, for only “virtuous men, patriotic men, learned men can make republics.” Toward this end, he proposed a poder moral as one of the nation’s basic institutions, an educational body that would be responsible for instilling ethics and civic responsibilities (pp. 223-224)…”