Week 4: Independence Narratives, Past and Present

The writings of Marti and Bolivar and the speech of Chavez all share a striking resemblance in terms of theme; they are all very anti-imperialist in tone. Starting with Bolivar, seeing the success of the Americans in their Revolutionary War of 1776 the sentiment (which had already been around in Latin America) grew vastly for a similar violent expulsion of their colonial rulers in a relatively short amount of time, denouncing the ruling method of the Spanish as being unnecessarily forceful and tyrannic.

A century later Marti in Cuba expressed similar feelings about the Spanish Empire and her rule there and later on concerns about the Americans colonising Cuba after the Spanish Empire's prophesied demise (in Cuba).

Another century and Hugo Chavez is speaking to the G-15 (Non-aligned movement countries) about again Western Imperialism albeit in a much less obvious form; using the terms neo-liberalism, globalism, and neo-colonialism almost interchangeably.

In addition to the reading in the textbook these texts paint a very strong mosaic of the attitudes felt in Latin America about imperialism in any of its many colours, with the rather obvious feeling being a quite literally violent repulsion to the idea. All of these texts play into the stereotype of Latin America being a region which is very passionate and often unstable, due to the values which these rallying cries, as many of texts are, seem to proliferate.

I feel that in general they all have a valid point, however I think that some of their grievances against the imperialist powers be it Spain or the USA are perhaps a little exaggerated to fit their agenda of the person giving the speech or writing, however even in the modern day these ideas of neo-colonialism and imperial are showing to be influential and relevant with the rise of populist movements in Europe and the USA and the general backlash against globalisation. Hopefully we don't see any violent revolutions in the modern day like we did the in past.