Read Online Redeemers by Enrique Krauze - Free Book Online Page A

journalist and representative of the classic republican tradition; and the legendary Ecuadorian journalist Juan Montalvo (whose liberal writings against the theocratic government of Gabriel García Moreno were so efficacious that they led to the assassination of the autocrat). But, from his tower, Prospero contemplates his primary hero: the Liberator Simón Bolívar.
    In his essay on Bolívar, Rodó did not need to quote Carlyle. The inspiration is clear. Though the style of Rodó is nowhere near as torrential as that of the Scotsman, the shadow of Rodó’s model drifts through his elegant modernist prose. In the style of Carlyle’s On Heroes and Hero Worship , Rodó undertakes an exegetical journey through the major episodes of Bolívar’s life. Few men other than Bolívar, he writes, “subjugate with such violent authority the sympathies of the heroic imagination.” Nothing better illustrates Rodó’s view of Bolívar as a chosen one than the comparison he draws with other leaders of the wars for Latin American independence, especially with San Martín: “Bolívar is a Hero , San Martín is not a Hero . San Martín is a great man, a great soldier, a great captain, an illustrious and extremely beautiful figure. But he is not a Hero .” So deep were the aftereffects of Rodó’s portrait of Bolívar that, almost a hundred years later, Julio María Sanguinetti, twice president of Uruguay, could recite a fragment of the essay by memory: “Great in thought, great in action, great in glory, great in his great misfortune that served to magnify the impure aspect latent in the soul of great men and great for taking upon himself, in his abandonment and his death, the tragic expiation of his greatness.”
    A year before the publication of El mirador de Próspero , another Latin American devotee of Carlyle, the Peruvian Francisco García Calderón (whom the Chilean poetess Gabriela Mistral would later call “the effective heir of Rodó”), had published, in Paris, Les démocraties latines d’Amerique (The Latin Democracies of America), with a prologue by the future president of France, Raymond Poincaré. It was a treatise on the political history of Latin America based on a fusion of fashionable evolutionist theories and the complete reduction of history to biography, in emulation of Carlyle. Following the lead of Rodó, García Calderón moves away from the classic republican viewpoint and tries to present a way to better understand the politics of the continent. Dissenting from Sarmiento (who, in his Facundo , the biography of a gaucho soldier and politician, had defined the fundamental dilemma of Latin America as the violent encounter “between civilization and barbarism”), García Calderón’s variation of the new Latin American idealism would dissolve Sarmiento’s antinomy through an equalizing vindication of the civilizers (like Sarmiento or his fellow Argentine Juan Bautista Alberdi) and the fierce backwoods caudillos who seemed to have risen from the soil to ride at the forefront of their marauding armies. In Argentina, the classic republican Bernardino Rivadavia had been (here he quotes Groussac) “the ardent forger of utopias.” Opposing him had arisen the terrifying “caliph” Facundo with his “mystical barbarism.” And finally the dictator Rosas arrived. His “fecund despotism,” his “necessary terrorism” finished off “war and terror.” The formula was almost dialectical: Rivadavia the thesis, Facundo the antithesis, Rosas the synthesis. With the same simple measure, García Calderón judged all the strong and constructive presidents of Hispanic America, excluding those who were only tyrants and no more. The Peruvian Ramón Castilla was the “necessary dictator of an unstable republic.” Other dictatorial caudillos to whom he