Arana graciously discussed her biography and the legacy of Bolivar by telephone from her office at the Library of Congress in Washington, D. Robin Lindley: Congratulations on your sweeping new book on Simon Bolivar.
What prompted your foray into history with this magisterial biography? Did you see a need for a new portrait of Bolivar? Marie Arana: I have been steeped in history for all of my life and for a good bit of my career even though it was a crypto-occupation with history for me.
I was very aware of how you build one and make one work. Going on to be books editor at the Washington Post , history was one of my favorite genres and I often reviewed it and paid particular attention to it.
I also served on several non-fiction and biography prize juries, and so had considerable exposure to the genre. I was drawn to Bolivar because I was trying to find one person who captured a good sweep of Latin American history in one story, and so would allow me to bring North American readers to Latin American in the most engaging manner. There are so few North Americans out there who truly understand the history or have read much about it.
When I sat down and tried to think of the one person whose story most affected the region in terms of its history and personality, the one I kept coming back to was Simon Bolivar. There were many reasons for this. For one thing, he changed the Spanish language. His writing is free of stuffy Spanish locutions, maybe because he was at war, in a hurry, and writing three or four letters at a time.
It was a different way of communicating; certainly different from anything that was being produced in printed works at the time.
He also changed the history of a territory all the way from Panama to Bolivia. He became, for me, the history, the language, the very personality of Latin America. He was this great, valiant, historic personality who also happened to be funny, smart, engaging, who loved to dance, and loved women.
He was in many ways the kind of person Latin Americans aspire to be. And you have a personal connection to the history. Could you talk about your family connection and your perception of Bolivar when you were a child in Lima?
And I remember that there were three portraits hanging prominently in the living room of that house. They were stern, brooding images of my ancestors. He was the first to fall. He had charged before anyone else and was killed before anyone else.
Across from him was a wan young woman, staring at him day after day in that living room. She turned out to be the daughter of the Spanish brigadier general. She was born after he was killed, because when he went off to fight that battle, his wife had been expecting her.
That wistful young woman ended up marrying the third person on the wall, a young patriot soldier who also had fought at the battle of Ayacucho. Which is to say, he fought against the Spanish general, and married his daughter sixteen years later. So here I am, this child of warring factions. It happened in the United States with families that fought the Civil War on both sides.
But for me, it was a very visible and present thing. I saw those faces every day and they fascinated me. The battle of Ayacucho became a mythic event for me. And so, Bolivar was very much on my mind as I grew up, as was the Argentine independence leader Jose de San Martin, and the whole business of revolution even into the twentieth century. Everyone was aware of how Spanish you were or how Peruvian you were. Nobody here talks about how English or American you are. Lafayette admired Bolivar and they corresponded.
He loved being called the George Washington of South America. But Bolivar was a polar opposite of George Washington. I never grew up thinking he was anything like Washington. He was as singular a figure as George Washington. And Bolivar was not particularly loved in Peru.
In the process of writing this biography, I have come to admire and respect him. But I grew up in a country that resented him because, in the course of liberating Peru, he actually reduced it. Before the revolution, Peru was grand and sprawling. It had been the heart of South America when it was a colony. It was rich and important, the power center of the empire. Bolivar called Peru the land of gold and slaves.
But when Bolivar liberated Peru, he shrank it. Peru went from being a great hub to being a republic among many others, and its power was reduced drastically. Certainly my father was not a fan of Bolivar.
So he went begging to Bolivar, and Bolivar essentially said that there was not room for both of them in Peru. What are some of the salient things North Americans should know about Bolivar? Thank you so much. The one thing to remember is that these two regions sprang from very different histories, very different territories.
The revolution fought here over the rolling landscape of New England and the Mid-Atlantic was very different from the revolution fought in South America. First of all, the South American territory was seven times the size, and included jungles, steamy tropical rivers and the Andes with its impossible, snow-capped promontories.
Highly influenced by the examples of the United States, the French Revolution and Napoleon, he led a massive revolt against Spanish colonial rule in South America, beginning in He personally dominated the revolutionary period until his death in , but struggled to consolidate the revolution. Success initially inspired hope for a fully-unified Spanish South America, Bolivar's Gran Colombia, which led from to , including today's countries of Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, Peru and Venezuela.
Spain was reeling from years of French occupation and guerrilla warfare. The Spanish garrisons in Latin America were relatively small and not very well supported by the creoles. Just as France played the role of spoiler during the North American war for independence, Britain played a pivotal role in providing arms and ammunition to the Latin American forces.
The ranks of the Latin American army were also peppered with British mercenaries who had served in the peninsular campaigns. Despite the strong contrasts on the battlefield, the two leaders were even more different politically. Financial Markets. Emerging Markets. Latin America. News Financial Markets Europe U. Home Economonitor Latin America. By Walter Molano This is not the first time that political leaders resurrected characters from the distant past to provide credence to their irrationality.
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