A Failed Independence: Enlightenment Rhetoric in Simon Bolivar's "The Jamaica Letter"
The War for Independence from Spain was fought with varied intensity and involvement throughout Latin America from 1810-1826. Simón Bolívar, with his intellectual and military prowess, was quickly acclaimed as a leader in this Independence War, that he would call in his writings, a "revolution". In "The Jamaica Letter" written on September 6, 1815, Bolívar asserts the ideals and intentions of the Latin American "revolution" and, in addition, predicts the various governmental structures that could be established. The letter not only reflects one Independents' assertions and predictions, but locates the fighting and its desired conclusions within specific and important historical and philosophical contexts. Therefore, the language and references employed throughout the letter, justify and validate the violence with precedents, such as the French and American Revolutions, as well as the Enlightenment ideals which propelled them. However, this geographically vast revolution was successful only in separating itself from the rule of Spain, and not in implementing these broad ideals for the construction of stable nations. This partial failure can be seen as a result of various factors, including lack of foreign support, the sheer size of the region in which the "rebelling" groups resided, the social and economic nature of the "rebelling" group, and the mestizo nature of the culture in general. It remains, then, that "The Jamaica Letter" is loaded with a rhetoric of freedom and inalienable rights that justified the current fighting but did not justify the creation of a democratic nation with justice and freedom for all. The extenuating circumstances in Latin America were not capable of being assuaged by Enlightenment ideals that had been developed within their own historical and cultural context.
Bolívar uses the epistolary style to forcefully respond to questions raised by a gentleman supporter from Jamaica as to the progress of the fighting and its conclusion. In "The Jamaica Letter", Bolívar employs references to history to locate the movement within what he perceived as a continuum of political events that spanned both space and time. Therefore, the fighting in Latin America is a continuation of the movement of revolutions that began with the United States in 1776 and France in 1789. Furthermore, the fighting is explained using the language of Enlightenment philosophy which began with such thinkers as Rousseau, Montesquieu, and Locke, in France before the revolution there. "Generous souls always interest themselves in the fate of a people who strive to recover the rights to which the Creator and Nature have entitled them, and one must indeed be wedded to error and passion not to harbor this noble sentiment."(Bolívar 32) This noble sentiment presents the idea that freedom and rights are inalienable, and therefore natural. The Enlightenment movement conceived of the social as operating within nature, rather than in the world of the divine. This radical transformation of the distinctions between spheres of knowledge place the social and the natural within the realm of rational and scientific understanding. Bolívar explains the violence as a necessity; in order to reclaim the "natural" rights of man, blood must be shed. Bolívar attempts to rationalize or analyze the violence and treacheries of the wars in light of the ideals of freedom and justice. He, himself, has employed the rhetoric of the Enlightenment to rationalize the death, rape, and destruction of peoples and land, in terms of ideals. For if the social exists within nature as understood through science, Bolívar reasons, then the social acts of revolution and war may be understood through the same science. Again, Bolívar employs this idealistic language when he explains the beginning of the fighting, "facing anarchy for want of a legitimate, just, and liberal government, we threw ourselves headlong into the chaos of revolution."(Bolívar 36) For Bolívar, violence was a necessary means to obtain the ultimate fulfillment of their natural rights. The chaos of revolution would continue until the government was installed and order was established. The Enlightenment thinkers propose, in keeping with the ideals of freedom, justice, and liberality, that such a governent is democracy. But the ideals of the Enlightenment were implemented as nothing more than theoretical basis for justification of violence and never found themselves as a basis for the pragmatic process of creating democratic nations.
It is at this point in "The Jamaica Letter" where Bolívar is caught in the limited implementation of ideology. The Enlightenment ideals are employed as a fundamental explanation only up until freedom from Spain is accomplished. The ideals are, at this point, rejected for their incompatibility with the climate of Latin America during the process of creating nations. Bolívar states, "I desire to see America fashioned into the greatest nation in the world, greatest not so much by virtue of her area and wealth as by her freedom and glory."(Bolívar 38) Here, he continues to emphasize the ideals that provided justification for the violence, but qualifies his argument a few paragraphs later by stating, "Do not adopt the best system of government, but the one that is most likely to succeed."(Bolívar 41) Therefore, a government of freedom and glory is something to fight for but once the fighting is over, more realistic ideas about government must be established. The idea of a republic, although it "conform[s] with the aims of Europe," is impossible for Latin America due to their lack of knowledge about self-government and their cultural diversity.(Bolívar 39) Bolívar's earlier proposition of America as the "greatest nation of the world" is then rescinded by the statement, "it is a grandiose idea to think of consolidating the New World into a single nation..."(Bolívar 41) Moreover, it is not only the idea of a single nation in Latin America that is rejected but the idea of republics for many of the areas. "The American provinces are fighting for their freedom, and they will ultimately succeed. Some provinces as a matter of course will form federal and some central republics; the larger areas will inevitably establish monarchies.."(Bolívar 40) Thus, one finds that the Enlightenment ideals were successful in rationalizing the violence of these wars, a violence that, in the beginnings of modern warfare would seem irrational because of its sheer destructive power. But the creation of a democratic nation in any culture, however modern, can not be rationalized through the same ideals because the factors inherent in the culture may not be aligned with or interested in those ideals. In the case of Latin America, the cultural diversity of the area and the homogeneous nature (homogeneous as far as economic, educational, and cultural background) of the war supporters, as well as the prospect of continual fighting with little or no foreign aid, refused justification through lofty philosophical principles.
The failure of these wars lies not in the inability to achieve their primary goal -Latin America was separated from Spain- but it is, instead, located in the implementation of a successful response to this first achievement. The inability to create a stable nation in the primary years after the war would plague Latin America through the twentieth century, and until today. In order for a nation or nations to be successfully established, it would have been necessary to not only take part in a political revolution but also in a philosophical one. Latin America would need to develop its own ideals and governmental structures that would suit their own cultural and cosmological diversity. The War for Independence was not a revolution, as Bolívar would call it, for it did not produce a radical change in ideology nor did it break from the historical past, it was a rebellion of upper-class men who wanted economic freedom as much as, if not more than, political freedom. Bolívar, only five years into the fighting, had lost his impetus for radical change, as is evident through the progression in the argument of "The Jamaica Letter". The revolution, in the beginning, was something to die for as it was a struggle to attain natural and inalienable rights for the citizens of Latin America. In the end, however, Bolívar had begun to concede the important points of his earlier argument. The struggle for the ideals of freedom and liberty had been jettisoned because of their incompatibility in the Latin American situation. The complex process of nation building would not be completed through an implementation of the ideals of the Enlightenment.
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