The Legacy of a Liberator Named Bolivar
Bolivia is named for Simon Bolivar, the liberator of Latin America. It was the last piece of territory added to his dream of "Gran Colombia," a vast arc of allied nation-states that his populist revolution wrested from the Spanish royals starting with the takeover of Venezuela in 1821. The legacy of Bolivar was on the minds of those who follow the continent's affairs last week as Bolivia's new president, Evo Morales, called out the troops on May Day and nationalized the country's gas industry, alarming everyone from Wall Street bankers to the left-leaning president of Brazil. With Peru poised for another left-wing nationalist to win election in a few weeks, people were starting to wonder if Latin America's "leftward shift," as the pundits had been calling it, was becoming a full-scale revolution. Certainly, Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, the self-styled Bolivarian heir seen wearing a pleased-as-a-papa smile last week, didn't need a weatherman to tell him which way the wind was blowing.
The grim-faced soldiers evoked Latin America's bad old days when popinjay generals expropriated foreign property on a whim--and created economic chaos in the process. More recently, Latin governments have adhered to the rules imposed by global financial markets, and their economies have grown--though not for everyone. The curse of the continent is that the rich-poor split has barely budged since the days of, well, Bolivar.
Now Chavez, under the tutelage of Fidel Castro, touts what he calls Bolivarian socialism as the antidote, with a first step being redistribution of energy profits to the vote-rich slums. He's finding takers for his model in Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador. Along with Colombia, these are the same states that made up Bolivar's grand vision, which, unfortunately, did not end well. Soon after the alliance was formed, it dissolved into a series of civil wars. Bolivar died in 1830, sick and dejected at what he had come to believe was an ungovernable continent. "Those who have served the revolution," he wrote before he died, "have plowed the seas."
This story appears in the May 15, 2006 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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