An informative essay by two of Colombia’s leading authorities in the field, Drs. Luis Martínez Delgado and Sergio Elías Ortiz, precedes this important compilation of Bogotá newspapers from the dawn of the independence movement.
When the creoles in Santa Fé de Bogotá successfully disavowed the rule of the Peninsular Council of Regency, expelled their viceroy, Antonio Amar y Borbón, and established their own junta after July 20, 1810, they appointed Manuel del Socorro Rodríguez (1754-1819), Cuban-born intellectual, editor of their nascent junta’s first newspaper, La Constitución Feliz. Only a single issue of the Constitución appeared, that of August 17, 1810, and its tone seemed far too diffident and timid of Peninsular authority to suit the more radical minority among the junta members.
Thus, Rodríguez’s periodical was replaced by a more stridentvoiced organ, the bi-weekly Diario Político de Santafe de Bogotá, edited by Joaquín Camacho (1776-1816) and Francisco José de Caldas (1771-1816). The Diario Político, a far greater deliberate effort at apologetic propaganda, was to appear in a total of forty-six numbers plus seven supplemental issues, from August 27, 1810 to February 1, 1811. While maintaining the fiction of loyalty to the imprisoned Ferdinand VII, the Diario went to great lengths in informing its readers of the events of July 20th and succeeding weeks. With fervent enthusiasm, its editors sought to win mass creole support for the Bogotá junta throughout the entire viceroyalty and argued vehemently against the local divisions and sectional rivalries which plagued New Granada’s First Republic during the 1810-1816 epoch.
The third of the newspapers, the weekly Aviso al Público was published in twenty-one numbers and seven supplemental issues from September 28, 1810, to February 16, 1811. Its editor was the erudite Augustinian monk, Fray Diego Padilla (1754-1829). Reflecting a more theoretical approach to the problems of the Bogotá junta, Fray Diego’s Aviso is filled with quotations from learned authors, both sacred and profane, and far less news of the day than its immediate predecessor and contemporary, the Diario.
Taken as a whole, these three pioneer patriot newspapers provide a most valuable insight into the minds (and hearts) of the creoles of the 1810-1811 period in Bogotá. In addition, the periodicals are well endowed with political, biographical, economic, and geographic data. Of the three, only the Diario Político has seen previous re-publication nearly six decades ago in the Colombian Academy of History’s Boletín de Historia y Antigüedades (March-December, 1903). Drs. Martínez Delgado and Ortiz are to be commended for their careful and faithful transcription. It is unfortunate that this otherwise significant source suffers from printer’s errors and a less than adequate index.
