Lope de Aguirre, Hugo Chávez, and the Latin American Left. Alfredo Ignacio Poggi
fear was activated, and his body reacted. For Darwin and the biological determinists, emotions are present since birth in our natural constitution and simply await activation by external stimuli.
Jan Plamper imagines an Aristotelian response. For Plamper, following Aristotle, even emotions that seem instinctual are the product of social learning.
Aristotle would have traced my fear of the snake I saw in the woods to the imagined harm I suffered from the threat of its bite, but ascribed to me the capacity of suppressing any preprogrammed emotion before it started because I had, as a 6-year-old visiting the terrarium in the Boston Zoo, developed a real love of snakes, or stopping it because as a 40-year-old I had engaged in behavioral therapy that kept my phobia in check.[44]
Much of the Western intellectual tradition follows Aristotle in its belief in the possibility of shaping emotions, especially in antiquity and the Middle Ages. Moreover, several schools of psychology take this point to heart and work with their patients through imaginative exercises. Anger management therapies, for instance, with their variety of cognitive-behavioral methods, are popular today.
Unveiling the wrathful constitution of the first modern anti-imperial project can reveal a working map of the dangers and opportunities of such enterprises in the future. According to Habermas, philosophy—and the humanities in general—were impregnated in the nineteenth century with the idea of praxis, to the point that it took precedence over theory.[45] Marx’s motto that we study the world precisely in order to change it has become increasingly relevant in all disciplines and ideological camps. This clarifies the meaning of the fourth great rupture proposed by Habermas: the break from logocentrism, from the centrality of the word and of symbolic order. The primacy of theory over actual practice has, in modernity, been reversed.
In conclusion, how might we approach Lope de Aguirre and the marañón rebellion considering these four ruptures? The first step, extending through the next two chapters, will be to analyze the available historical sources—ten relaciones, four chronicles, the three letters of Lope de Aguirre, the declaration of independence, and notes from the marañones’ trials—within this clarified framework of the European imposition of a new, “Modern Moral Order,” and the corresponding reaction of anti-imperial wrath. Chapters 4 and 5 will then present a serious challenge: how can we analyze the permanence of (and variations in) the anti-imperialist social imaginary without falling into a methodological chaos? Which adaptations of Aguirre will we select from among the many?
Admittedly, the choice will be somewhat arbitrary, as many methodological decisions are, yet it will still retain a basic logic. I will analyze only those historical works and fictional adaptations that rehabilitated the figure of Aguirre as a positive character. One of the contributions of this work will be to show how, for three centuries, the figure of Aguirre was condemned by all writers, historians, and artists of different ideologies and political tendencies. However, in the late nineteenth century and with the rise of Latin American anti-imperialism against the United States, Aguirre’s reputation was salvaged and he was re-imagined as a precursor of continental liberation. Moreover, during the twentieth century, the figure of Aguirre moved progressively toward the ideologies of the left, and it has been socialist and communist thinkers who have defended him most vehemently from criticism. In this sense, the Latin American leftist movements not only appropriated anti-imperialism during the twentieth century but also defended Aguirre, the Wrath of God.
Finally, in the last two chapters, the connection between Aguirre and the consolidation of liberation movements and theory—especially as they reached their apogee in the 1960s and 70s—will allow us to study and unveil the component of anger and the exclusion of mercy in the Latin American anti-imperialist imaginary, which still has an impact on current political events. With our initial theoretical map of Aguirre’s expedition in hand, we now set off into the heart of the marañones’ anti-imperialist jungle and encounter the primary sources that will support, contradict, or enrich our investigation.
Notes
1.
Jürgen Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking, trans. William Mark Hohengarten (Boston: MIT Press, 1992), 7.
2.
Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking, 32-35.
3.
In Being and Time, Heidegger rebuilds the phenomenology of Husserl and asks the great ontological questions from within the world, that is, from within concrete “existential” circumstances under which the human being is thought. In Truth and Method, following Heidegger, Gadamer renews hermeneutics, which is anchored in a particular interpretive horizon, as the starting point of all knowledge. From the field of analytic philosophy, Wittgenstein departs from his early Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, claiming that language is actually a game characterized and determined by concrete contexts each with its own system of rules. Thus, in the Philosophical Investigations, the “second Wittgenstein” moves away from the positivist-logical idea of language, focusing instead on its pragmatic function immersed in contextual realities.
4.
Some historians, like María Briceño Pérez, dispute the credibility of the historical sources Miguel Otero Silva uses to support his assertions.
5.
The soldiers who followed Aguirre are called marañones, because their rebellion occurred on the Marañón River in the middle of the Amazon.
6.
Ingrid Galster, Aguirre o la posteridad arbitraria: La rebelión del conquistador vasco Lope De Aguirre en historiografía y ficción histórica (1561-1992) (Bogotá: Editorial Universidad del Rosario, 2011), 745.
7.
Galster, Aguirre, 745.
8.
Rolena Adorno, “Reconsidering Colonial Discourse for Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Spanish America.” Latin American Research Review, vol. 28, no. 3 (1993): 139.
9.
One could even debate whether there is a historical truth, but this is not the objective of this work. As Lionel Grossman and Louis Mink have pointed out, a radical differentiation between literature and history persists in common sense and in the work of numerous historians dating from the late eighteenth century, in which the former is associated with fiction, imagination, and interpretation and the latter with objective truth and real data; see The Writing of History: Literary Form and Historical Understanding. Robert H. Canary and Henry Kozicki, ed. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), 129-30. Since the mid-twentieth century, however, this position has been criticized because it rests on several dubious assumptions. The idea of a unified universal history itself must be challenged; see The Writing, 149. Historical data does not generate a unified narrative structure by itself; rather, it is the historian who imposes one upon it, precisely through imagination; see The Writing, 136-37. Furthermore, for Kieran Egan, historians rely on their epistemological pre-understanding, or what Hayden White calls a “meta-history,” in discerning chains of historical cause and effect that lend meaning and coherence to their telling of the whole story; see The Writing, 41, 92. In this sense, to say that this study will work with the textual reality and the social imaginary does not imply that it will analyze a fictional world without any connection to reality. On the contrary, it implies that it is precisely the interpretative and imaginative dimension of the historical documents and their subsequent adaptations that will gradually become evident.
10.
Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking, 7.
11.
Levi-Strauss took Saussure’s linguistics and applied it to anthropology in such works as Structural Anthropology.
12.
Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Random House, 1993), 9.
13.