L.A.

A few things to be noted in Bolivar’s text is a certain confusion that seems to be between the power of the representatives of the people and the power of the people, if they are to have any power. For instance, at the beginning of the Angostura Address, Simon Bolivar talks about the representatives of national sovereignty having a will, which is absolute? So one of the first questions that pop to my mind was what does it mean to say that they have a will, which is absolute? Would not the people have absolute an absolute will within the Rousseauian tradition of political philosophy? In that regard the ‘representatives’ of the people don’t really have absolute power, but only derivative power. The suspicions mentioned above where to a certain extent confirmed when he argues for a hereditary senate, particularly for the liberator of Venezuela, he seems to be sure that the only way for Venezuela to honour the sacrifice of those who fought the Spanish is to honour them with a hereditary senate and if Venezuela fails to do so, it simply does not deserve to be free. The later more than an argumentation in favour of a hereditary Senate, seems to be a statement of force in favour of it.

After reading Bolivar’s text and looking at the history of a few Latin American countries, one cannot but agree with Margaret E. Crahan when she argues that one of the consequences of the political wars of independence was that new groups took the place that before was occupied by the Spaniards or the Portuguese, because the criollos where not so much interested in liberty and equality for everyone, but rather annoyed for being servile to the occupier, but once the occupier has left, the political structures and the ways of conducting the business of the State remain more or less the same. So rather than being revolutionary, the wars of independence were more about transfer of power than establishment of political novel associations which maintained the promise of individual rights that were made by creoles like Antonio Nariño.

Another point where Crahan hits the nail is when she argues that one of the reasons why the countries that had recently attained independence where far away from having political structures that guarantee the political equality that the revolutionaries predicated was because the structure of State that they had inherited, had not integrated the discourse and practice of individual rights that had already swept England and France. In consequence, the practical structure of the State simply was not ready to grant equality to the impoverished classes and there was not a political class able and willing to demand from the emerging political class, allegiance to the promises they had made when they were trying to get people’s support. As Crahan notes, the centralized structure of the Latin American incipient states saw the Church as a conservative force that sided with the reactionary forces in an effort to maintain a status quo which was beneficial to that sector of the population; however, those who were more prone to openness and equality saw precisely in the Church an anchor that did not help the political and economical advancement of the countries. The difficulty of agreeing on the idea of a nation and the procedure of how the nation should be ruled, led to different internal conflicts that were often aided by the different neighbors who were trying to take political and economical advantage of the new configurations of the political scenarios in the region.

Although she blames the emergence of authoritarian regimes in the chaos created by the needs of a dependent capitalism and the emergent demands for democratization, it seems that neither the structure of the State was developed to guarantee democratic rights, nor the people was ready to challenge the circumvention of the rules which had rendered laws, edicts and constitutions simply dead letter. The latter explains why the emergence of Marxist communities was not able to transcend the personalism and allegiance to an specific creed, rather than the pursuing of individual and communal interests under the certainty of rights and the rule of law.