These latest additions to “Bolivariana” reflect the diverse contemporary interest in and use of Simón Bolívar and his career. Following his studies of Erich Fromm and Sigmund Freud, Mauro Torres turns the tools of biography and psychoanalysis upon the Liberator. Salcedo-Bastardo, issuing a call for a new consciousness and a final liberating revolution for Latin America, presents Bolívar as the true revolutionary, an authentic guide for a new order. Both are challenging interpretations, but fail to contribute anything new to our understanding of the central figure of the Latin American revolutions.
In this updating of his Perspectiva psicoanalítica de Simón Bolívar (1968), Torres focuses upon two salient characteristics of Bolívar’s personality: his hyperactivity and his genius. Torres finds hereditary evidence for the hyperactivity in the personality of the Liberator’s father, Juan Vicente Bolívar. This need for action and challenge is channeled into a military and political career as a result of two critical events: the death of Bolívar’s wife which liberated him from the normal social constraints of family and society; and the disillusionment with Miranda, which freed Bolívar from the lure of hero worship and brought him to the conviction that he must play the central and directing role in the events of his time. This led Bolívar to conclude that glory and a historical stature were his true goals. Wealth and power became secondary and incidental attributes. Freed from these restrictions Bolívar’s genius emerged, which Torres concedes as a unique phenomenon of vision and ability, but constrained within the bounds of warfare. He concludes that Bolívar was a victor, a warrior who thrived on the demands for quick action and the transformation of events, but was incapable of accepting the erratic and hesitant pace of building a lasting political order.
By contrast, Salcedo-Bastardo argues that the ideas of the Liberator formed a true revolutionary program. Reviewing the colonial heritage, Salcedo concludes that an authentic rebelliousness against injustice and inequality had reached a revolutionary maturity as Bolívar entered the scene. Content with a textbook review of Bolívar’s life, the author concentrates upon the ideology of the Liberator.
Discussing the issues of sovereignty, centralism, agrarian reform, slavery, Latin American unity, and freedom, Salcedo tries to piece together an intellectual profile of Bolívar as a true radical. His argument is unconvincing and contradictory. He extols Bolívar as a believer in a true participatory democracy rather than simply a representative one and yet he concedes that Bolívar felt that some matters must not be exposed to the uncertainties of elections. He hails Bolívar as a true pacifist but admits that the Liberator used war as a means to his ends and reached the stage of viewing the army as the principal guarantor of peace. Salcedo concludes that by the end of Bolívar’s life the division of society was a sharp contrast of “Bolívar and the people” against the caudillos and oligarchs.
Both studies beg the question of Bolívar’s relationship to the intellectual climate of the times. Torres explores the genius of the Liberator in terms of an environment of war and the conquest of glory, but avoids any discussion of how this intellect dealt with the issues and ideas of the day. Salcedo decries the use of Bolívar as symbol by the conservatives, but in his attempt to capture the Liberator for the cause of the left, he remains superficial and polemical.
