SIMÓN BOLÍVAR’S REPUBLIC: A BULWARK AGAINST THE “TYRANNY” OF THE MAJORITY

• Autor(a) principal: Helg, Aline
• Data de Publicação: 2012
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Revista de Sociologia e Política
• Texto Completo: https://revistas.ufpr.br/rsp/article/view/31810
• topic: Ciência Política; Simón Bolívar; independence; citizenship; nation building; race relations; slavery

Based on Bolívar’s speeches, decrees, and correspondence as well as on Gran Colombia’s constitutionsand laws, this essay examines the tensions within Bolívar’s vision of Venezuela’s and New Granada’s societyproduced by his republican, yet authoritarian and hierarchical ideas, his concern for keeping the lowerclasses of African descent in check, and his denial of Indian agency. It shows that even in Peru, Bolívar’smain concern was to prevent the racial war and social disintegration that allegedly slaves and free Afrodescendedpeople would bring to the newly independent nations. To prevent such an outcome, he advocatedall along legal equality through the abolition of the colonial privileges and, since mid-1816, the abolitionof slavery, but simultaneously the preservation of the monopole of power by the white creole elite. Hesecured the perpetuation of the socioracial hierarchy inherited from Spain by a two-edged citizenship: anactive citizenship restricted to a tiny literate and skilled minority and an inactive citizenship for theimmense majority of (mostly nonwhite) men.