The Liberator, the prophet
Simon Bolivar died alone, betrayed, and bitter. After dashing his armies back and forth across the mountains and plains of South America and spending his fortune and his life to liberate an entire continent from Spanish colonial rule and replace it with liberal republicanism, he wrote the following bitter note to one of the many warlords whose petty infighting collapsed Bolivar’s vision only five years after its fulfillment:
I have arrived at only a few sure conclusions: 1. For us, [South] America is ungovernable. 2. He who serves a revolution ploughs the sea. 3. The only thing we can do in [South] America is emigrate. 4. This country will eventually fall into the hands of the unbridled mob, and will proceed to almost imperceptible petty tyrannies of all complexions and races. 5. Devoured as we are by every kind of crime and annihilated by ferocity, Europeans will not go to the trouble of conquering us. 6. If it were possible for any part of the world to revert to primordial chaos, that would be [South] America’s final state.
Today, 200 years after Bolivar, Latin America doesn’t matter. It produces almost nothing of note, and the rest of the world almost completely ignores it. Since the end of the Cold War, not even the United States has bothered much with it, except when forced to by drug lords and high rates of illegal immigration.
High crime, inequality, racism, poverty, etc., are still common, and though many thinkers today like to blame these problems on imperialism, the IMF, the World Bank, and capitalism, the more likely cause is the same one that led Bolivar to make his bitter and prophetic analysis 200 years ago: terrible, selfish leadership.
It’s sad but appropriate that the last words of Latin America’s greatest and most selfless leader had to be, “Let’s go, Let’s go, these people do not want us here.”