Reframing Latin America: A Cultural Theory Reading ... - BGSU Blogs

216 reframing latin america
political tremors through the country. Venezuela also had a century’s worth
of political experience behind her. An Independence movement, led by her
own Simón Bolívar, was followed, as in many new Latin American nations,
by civil wars between centralists and advocates for a loose federation. The
wars ended, as they did in Argentina, only when a provincial caudillo took
over the capital in 1830 and began a long and relatively stable dictatorship.
The problem in Venezuela (and elsewhere) was that confl ict did not end
there; caudillos, usually from the llano, continued to raise personal armies
and to destabilize the government. Well into Gallegos’s youth, Venezuelan
history showed a pattern of implacable dictatorships alternating with impractical
and short-term regimes.
In 1909 the intellectuals of Gallegos’s generation saw hope for a change
when a young military man named Juan Vicente Gómez replaced the conservative
president Castro. [. . .] Gómez turned out to be as ruthless a dictator
as Venezuela had known, but more effective. And the populist response
echoed the emancipatory demands of early nineteenth-century revolutionary
Independence movements. But by now, after the experience of long civil
wars following the wars of Independence, it was clear that freedom without
stability leads back to (neocolonial) bondage [. . .].
One wonders if Gallegos admired him too; he certainly admits fascination
for the dictator’s incarnation into “the appealing body of a woman” (literally,
her “appetizing fl esh”). Gómez is said to have reciprocated by approving
enthusiastically of Doña Bárbara, which, he said, “Venezuelan writers
should imitate instead of getting involved in those goddamn revolutions.”
Gallegos and his critics also acknowledge that Santos, the civilizing “cityzen,”
has something to learn about self-defense and necessary violence (I
would add passion) from Bárbara before he can replace her. This is certainly
a plausible reading; and it easily resolves the apparently bad fi t between the
year of the novel and its economic focus. As a critic of Gómez, Gallegos was
exposing him as a barbarous caudillo, a formidable but vincible obstacle to
prosperity and reform [. . .].
It is even possible that the historical guilt goes deeper and further back
than the civil wars. Perhaps it extends to the beginnings of Venezuelan history,
when white men started the process of modernizing or Europeanizing
the colony. That meant fi rst violating or exterminating the Indians, just
as half-Indian Bárbara had been raped by others and was being removed by
Santos. My speculation about Santos’s unspoken guilt, or his uneasiness
about the possibility that he and his forebears are implicated in the chain
of usurpations on the llano, shares some ground with Roberto González
Echevarría’s reading of the novel’s dilemma. He points out that the liti-