Hugo Chávez is on the verge of enshrining socialism in Venezuela's constitution, but how much does his Bolivarian Revolution distort the legacy of Simón Bolívar, asks Tom Hennigan.
One of the more remarkable aspects of Venezuela's Bolivarian Revolution is the way its leader, Hugo Chávez, has mixed his own makeshift socialism with reverence for the country's aristocratic liberator, Simón Bolívar, to create his revolutionary ideology.
If Venezuelans approve changes proposed by their president in a referendum tomorrow, socialism will be enshrined as a state priority in the constitution of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.
This would cap a remarkable switch in the use of Bolívar's legacy, having gone from buttressing many of South America's conservative, autocratic rulers to becoming the touchstone of the continent's most daring socialist experiment in two decades.
For most of the time since the death in 1830 of the Liberator, as Bolívar is known, his memory has been easily appropriated by the region's conservatives, who see him as one of their own and have used his legacy to legitimise their authoritarian regimes.
Despite fighting to overthrow Spain's colonial rule on the continent and being a child of the Enlightenment, Bolívar was in many ways a deeply conservative man. Drawn from Venezuela's native-born aristocracy, he fought to liberate his continent, all the while fearing that the violence he unleashed could cause the continent's deep racial tensions to explode and see the poor, mixed-race majority turn on the small, white elite.
Bolívar was not personally racist, considering racial differences just "accidents of skin". He freed slaves and sought to place indigenous people on an equal legal footing with other citizens. But the great fear that haunted him through his remarkable career was that a free America could lead to a pardocracy - rule by pardos, people of mixed race.
He was always alert to any signs of independence among his mixed-race lieutenants lest they try and seize power by appealing to the racial resentment of the majority. Notoriously, he executed two of his mixed-race generals for rebelliousness, in contrast to his leniency towards white subordinates, which extended to overlooking an attempt to assassinate him.
This fear of race war was deeply ingrained in the class from which he came, haunted as it was by the spectre of the Haitian slave revolution of 1791, which led to mass killings of whites. For Bolívar, the risk of racial demagoguery ruled out democracy in the new republics he created, whose citizens he believed were not yet ready for it after three centuries subjected to the "ignorance, tyranny and vice" of Spanish rule.
His solution was authoritarian constitutions wrapped in liberal rhetoric. He strongly opposed federalism, favoured presidents-for-life with the right to pick their successors and hereditary senates modelled on the British House of Lords. For Bolívar, a republic of equals blind to race could best be guaranteed by keeping power in the hands of a republican elite, drawn from the top ranks of his revolutionary armies.
This legacy was to have important consequences in the young republics as they vacillated between anarchy and authoritarianism in the decades after independence.
Strongmen were quick to use Bolívar's record and writings to justify their rule. The result was the creation of a cult of Bolívar that served to bolster militarism and order. The astonishing breadth of Bolívar's thinking on a huge array of matters, which in so many ways was far ahead of his times, was corrupted until it came to stand for religion, order, property, hierarchy and discipline.
By the 20th century he was drawing admiring praise from fascist theorists both in South America and in Europe. Ezio Garibaldi, grandson of the Italian patriot Giuseppe Garibaldi, described Mussolini as "the historical incarnation . . . of the Bolivarian spirit".
One of Franco's Spanish apologists wrote as recently as 1971 that the Spanish dictator was "the authentic interpretation of Bolivarian thought".
IF FOR MUCH of the last two centuries Bolívar has been revered by the hard right, he was rejected by the left. This was largely because the first left-wing thinker to tackle him was Karl Marx himself, who published a hatchet job on Bolívar in the form of an entry in The New American Cyclopaedia published in 1858. According to Marx, Bolívar was vain, lazy, incompetent and dependent for much of his success on the Europeans who came to fight in his armies.
In a letter to Engels about the entry, Marx wrote "it would have overstepped the mark to present him as a Napoleon I, this most cowardly, brutal and miserable swine. Bolívar is the real Soulouque" - comparing the liberator of five South American countries to the military officer who in 1849 declared himself emperor of Haiti and ruled for a decade in a Caribbean parody of imperial France.
Marx's attack on Bolívar marked him out as a reactionary class enemy of the left. But this presented the Latin left with a serious problem, because official promotion of the cult of Bolívar meant his memory was extremely popular in much of the continent, and nowhere more so than in Venezuela.
In his 2005 essay, Marx and Bolívar, the Venezuelan playwright and journalist Ibsen Martínez traces how the Latin left set out to overcome the problem set by Marx.
By the 1930s, and at the risk of being denounced as revisionists by Moscow, several communists in South America were pointing out that Bolívar could be excused some of his failings because dying in 1830 robbed him of the chance to read Marx. But it was during the Cold War that the left began its major reappraisal. With wars of national liberation raging around the Third World, Bolívar began to be viewed as a precursor figure in the anti-imperialist struggle.
As the backer of many of these wars, Moscow was eager now to rehabilitate Bolívar where it had once condemned him. Soviet Marxist theorist Anatoli Shulgovski sought to archive the 1858 entry by saying the usually infallible Marx had erred about Bolívar because he was forced to rely on hostile secondary sources.
By 1974, Colombia's M-19 guerrilla group had robbed Bolívar's sword to affirm their struggle for a socialist Colombia and "against the national and foreign masters who have deformed the ideas of the Liberator". In an era of CIA-sponsored coups, the Latin left eagerly promoted Bolívar's fear that the United States "seems destined by providence to plague America with miseries in the name of freedom".
THIS APPROPRIATION OF Bolívar by the left has culminated in Chávez's own Bolivarian Revolution. Chávez hero-worships Bolívar. He renamed his country the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela after its liberator. He quotes him constantly in his speeches. He pulls up an empty chair during cabinet meetings for the Liberator's guiding spirit and gives a replica of his sword as a gift to visiting heads of state.
But Bolívar would likely be appalled to find a zambo (mixed-race African and indigenous) president claiming to be fulfilling his life's work in a Venezuela dangerously divided along race as well as class lines.
IN A BIOGRAPHY published last year, historian John Lynch writes of Chávez's creation of a new socialist Bolivarian heresy to replace the old conservative ones: "Authoritarian populists, or neo-caudillos, or Bolivarian militarists, whatever their designation, invoke Bolívar no less ardently than did previous rulers, though it is doubtful he would have responded to their calls."
Chávez has created a new socialist Bolivarian heresy even as his revolution has been driven forward by all the conflicts in society which Bolívar hoped to contain - rich against poor, white against mixed race, a reactionary oligarchy in permanent confrontation with the populist regime that replaced it.
That such conflicts still rage almost two centuries after Bolívar first declared Venezuela liberated speaks to his own enormous political failure, which he recognised in one of his final letters.
In November 1830, as he slowly made his way towards an exile he only avoided through death at 47 years of age, and bitter at the end of his dream of ruling over a unified South America, Bolívar wrote to Juan José Flores, one of his generals who did so much to undermine those grand continental ambitions:
"You know that I have ruled for 20 years, and I have derived from these only a few sure conclusions: America is ungovernable, for us . . .
"Those who serve revolution plough the sea . . . This country will fall inevitably into the hands of the unrestrained multitudes and then into the hands of tyrants so insignificant they will be almost imperceptible, of all colours and races."