COLOMBIA: Back to Bolivar

Although North Americans revere Simón Bolívar as South America’s great Liberator, not many are aware how far to the right his political views veered in his last years. Last week those authoritarian views were again a hot political issue in Colombia.

Nearly 126 years ago, Bolívar tried to get Colombians to accept the new constitution he had written for the Republic of Bolivia. As a republican charter, it was a shocker; among other things, it called for a powerful President elected for life, drastic limitation of voting rights, and a three-chamber Congress, including a strong Chamber of Censors—also chosen for life. Colombians rejected the Liberator’s plan, went along instead with the local-rights doctrines of Bolívar’s estranged lieutenant, Francisco de Paula Santander, father of Colombia’s Liberal Party.

Last week, in the midst of a campaign to scrap the existing constitution, Colombia’s ruling Conservatives proclaimed that the father of the country was on their side. “We Conservatives,” said the Bogota newspaper Eco National, “take pride in the illustrious ascendancy of the Liberator, with whose authoritarian ideas we are in accord.”

The newspaper El Siglo, mouthpiece of ailing President Laureano Gómez, praised Bolivar’s idea of rule by an elite. In editorials supposedly written by Gómez himself, El Siglo echoed Bolívar’s dictum that “elections are the scourge of all republics,” and upheld the Liberator’s aristocratic approach to politics. Said El Siglo: “If the law is abnormal or inconvenient, push it to one side . . . Retain elasticity . . . though procedure may not always be strictly legal. The letter kills; the spirit gives life.”

Bogotá’s Liberals were incensed; in their partisan zeal, they jumped on the Liberator himself. Wrote German Arciniegas, historian and essayist, in El Tiempo: “Bolívar never believed in democracy, and . . . his contempt for the law and confidence in dictatorship overflowed . . . His formula was dictatorship backed by the army and the archbishops.”

At week’s end the debate crackled on as far as Colombia’s two-year-old state-of-siege conditions permitted. Though the President had lined up the Liberator for his favorite constitutional ideas, many of his own Conservatives seemed loth to turn the clock back. Even in 1826, one warned, Colombians wanted no part of the Bolivarian constitution. Nevertheless, the President pressed for action. Senator Alvaro Gómez, his son, demanded “complete constitutional reform.”