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An Analysis of the “Address of Bolívar at the Congress of Angostura, 1819”

By Anthony White and Miguel Pimentel 

Simón Bolívar never ran short on rhetoric. As he led campaigns to free large portions of South America from Spanish control, he wrote numerous epistles and offered many speeches sprinkled with metaphor and saturated in a tone of urgency meant to persuade his contemporaries to adopt his ideal vision of independence and its aftermath. In the revolutionary tradition, Bolívar framed Spain as a tyrannical nation that denied liberty to Americans, using incendiary and condemning language to validate the struggle for independence. Bolívar’s words reveal the tension between the spirit of republicanism and the development of the republic.

Bolívar makes extensive use of racially targeted language in order to demonstrate the extent of creole separation from Spain and to emphasize the need for regional independence. He declared that they—the people of the region—“are not Europeans; we are not Indians. We are but a mixed species of aborigines and Spaniard Americans by birth.”1 This statement was consistent with Bolívar’s oft-repeated contention that creoles represented a distinct people that deserved the right to forge their own distinct political path.

It is telling that Bolívar sought to frame independence in terms of resuming the fight his Indian ancestors once waged against Spanish incursion. He stated that his nation was “struggling to maintain ourselves [sic] in the country that gave us birth against the opposition of the invaders.”2 Much like language used in “Letter from Jamaica,” Bolívar references the region’s Indian descendants to make his case for repelling the nineteenth century Spanish “conquistadors,” who now conquer the people through tyranny rather than physical force, for good.3

This language, however, should not be seen as a truly radical shift from commonplace ideology. Bolívar’s Indian allusions were not stated in solidarity with indigenous populations, but rather to make a more impactful case for “creole” independence.4 Bolívar undoubtedly identified more readily with creoles and his Spanish roots than his indigenous ones. He referenced his indigenous roots when this strategy could be used to enhance the case for independence from Spain by framing peninsulares as part of a long legacy of mobilization against foreign oppressors. In sum, Bolívar did not use language pertaining to Indians to suggest any substantive unity with natives or to advocate for Indian equality in the republic, but rather used Indian/conquest allusions to present a strong case for independence, of course, to the benefiting creoles.

A similar assessment can be made of Bolívar’s use of racially charged language. Bolívar drew upon racially hierarchical language to emphasize the lack of freedom under Spanish rule, claiming that the region has been “placed in a state lower than slavery,” “robbed…of their freedom,” and “slavery is the daughter of darkness: an ignorant people is a blind instrument of its own destruction.”5 This is in a similar vein to the “Letter from Jamaica” in which some variation of the word “slave” was used eleven times.6 These slavery metaphors serve to indicate that the lack of American political liberty under Spanish rule is tantamount to the restricted freedom of slaves.

Bolívar refused, however, to engage slavery and black rights beyond the superficial. Bolívar did write about free blacks, pardos, being important to the shift to democracy and suggested that “national unity could be achieved through racial-mixing.”7 However, such statements had a utilitarian motive and were not meant to encourage pardo liberty. Bolívar sought the help of the region’s large pardo populationto achieve independence and supported racial mixing only to promote national unity in the struggle for independence. In truth, un-mixed blacks were left on the periphery with no real plans to incorporate them in the social or political structure of the Republic.  Furthermore, the ability of blacks to participate in the republic and claim liberty remained subject to the racial injustices that were condemned in Bolívar’s rhetoric but never substantially addressed.1 Indeed, as Marixa Lasso notes, he would later express much greater suspicion of the nonwhite pardos to Francisco de Paula Santander. According to Bolívar, the pardos wanted more than just legal equality and would eventually ruin the privileged classes. Thus, it speaks volumes that Bolívar presented racially-charged slavery metaphors but ignored the issue of racial liberty. Racial republicanism was not a top priority, but the visualizations of injustice made great metaphors.

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1Simón Bolívar, An Address of Bolivar at the Congress of Angostura (February 15, 1819),Reprint Ed., (Washington, D.C.: Press of B. S. Adams, 1919).

2 Ibid.

3 Simón Bolívar, Letter from Jamaica (September 6, 1815), Modern Latin America: Selected Primary Documents, p. 1.

 4 Ibid.

 5 Bolívar, Congress of Angostura.

 6 Bolívar, Letter from Jamaica, 3, 5, 9, 10, 16, 19, 20.

 7 Marixa Lasso, Myths of Harmony: Race and Republicanism during the Age of Revolution, Colombia 1795-1831, (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007), 62.

Skidmore, Thomas E., Peter H. Smith, and James N. Green. Modern Latin America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010

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