without running water.33 The repressed labour movement had strong, militant anarchist and anarcho-syndicalist currents.
Like similar celebrations everywhere in Latin America, the centenary in Buenos Aires was an occasion of ambitious efforts at urbanistic upscaling and iconic celebration. Settler culture got a new centre: the opera and music theatre Teatro Colón, of hemispheric fame. The various immigrant communities – German, French, Italian, Spanish and others – organized monumental tributes to the capital of their new homeland, though only the French managed to get theirs ready in time.34 The city also commissioned a sculptural ensemble called ‘Song to Labour’, but put it up only afterwards, in 1921. It shows a curious group of naked workers seemingly pulling a big stone, with great effort and ending in success.35 Apparently, it is still a rallying point on May Day. Like Meunier’s ‘Monument to Labour’ in Brussels (now virtually abandoned), the Buenos Aires ‘Song to Labour’ has no class or movement referent, but its triumphant end pose points to competitive sports instead of the serene piety of Meunier’s work.
After World War I, Buenos Aires got a more middle-class character, politically expressed by the Radical Civic Union, a middle-class politics without the urban impact of the coeval Lequía government in Lima. The ostentatious ancien régime palaces of the oligarchy have become public buildings, from the foreign ministry to an officers’ club. But Argentina never became a hegemonic middle-class society, with two political parties competing peacefully within a narrow, pre-defined field. The radical middle class and the privileged old right had already fallen out by 1930, and the Radical government was ousted by a military coup. The ensuing ‘Infamous Decade’ of military rule and massively fraudulent ‘elections’ developed several ‘pharaonic’ projects for Buenos Aires, most of them unrealized. Its major urban footprint was the opening of ‘the broadest avenue in the world’, the Avenida 9 de Julio, and its gigantic obelisk for the quadricentennial of the foundation of the city in 1536.36
To Buenos Aires’s very particular popular moment, in the form of post–World War II Peronism, and to its more conventional global moment, we shall return below.
Bogotá, the fourth vice-regal capital of Hispanic America, was a provincial town in a mountainous region with bad communications in an economically little developed realm between the two centres of the empire. Towards the end of the eighteenth century the city had no more than 13,000 inhabitants. However, it had two religious colleges of higher learning – the national congresses later assembled in the chapel of the ex-Jesuit college – as well as a small Enlightenment milieu, and played a major part in the official botanical exploration of South America. The city has been referred to as ‘the Athens of the South’.
Post-colonial Colombia had a difficult birth and got its major outline only in 1830, after Ecuador and Venezuela broke away from Gran Colombia (formerly New Granada). In the nineteenth century the country was riven by eight nationwide civil wars, fourteen local wars and two international wars. Bogotá developed slowly in violent, conservative aristocratic Colombia. By mid-century, central Bogotá was still without sewers, piped water or paved streets.37 It had about the same number of inhabitants, 40,000, in the 1870s as it did at the final establishment of Colombia in 1830.* It became a major city only in the twentieth century, when its growth rate was explosive. From 1905 to l951 its population increased more than sevenfold, and from 1951 until 2016 its population has multiplied ten times, reaching about eight million.38 Cundinamarca, the provice around Bogotá, has been part of the coffee boom since the late nineteenth century. Later Bogotá became the industrial and the financial as well as the political capital of the country, and for all its violence, now under some control, it has offered escape from the persistent mass violence in the countryside. It is spread out on a high plateau (more than 2,500 metres above sea level), with mountains to the east. Apart from its official buildings, Rogelio Salmona’s modernist redbrick architecture and the occasional colonial construction, its business centres, its small British-looking enclaves, and the gated and/or guarded upper-middle-class apartment complexes in the northeast, Bogotá today looks like a vast agglomeration of small towns from the 1950s, comprising two- or three-storeyed, more or (usually) less rundown buildings. Kennedy, a populous lower-middle-class area, bears witness to the fading but enduring US alignment. The large popular district in the south, Ciudad Bolívar, is not a slum, and testifies to collective urban mobility. But at the Bogotá city boundary all urban services in the metropolitan area end.
The power centre is still around the colonial Plaza Mayor (now Bolívar), but its buildings have had to be rebuilt several times due to earthquakes and fires, and the, not very impressive, cathedral is the only point of historical stability. Unplanned changes had already started in 1827 when the Vice-Regal Palace was destroyed by an earthquake, inaugurating a century and a half of temporary presidential accommodation. The current one was inaugurated in 1979, an upgrading of a building from 1908 on the site of the house of the great Colombian Enlightenment figure Antonio Nariño. The presidential Casa Nariño is behind, and slightly below, the Capitolio (Congress), initiated in 1846 and completed in 1926, a heavy neoclassical construction without a cupola, which has a seemingly commanding presence in the plaza. In front is the more modern Palace of Justice, twice severely damaged by urban violence, in 1948 and in 1985. On one side of the Plaza is the rather austere cathedral and the archbishop’s palace, and on the other is the City Hall, a long, horizontal French nineteenth-century-style building from the early twentieth century, originally a commercial market.
Except for some liberal and anti-clerical moments, when some buildings of the rich Church were nationalized and secularized – like in Lisbon and Madrid – Colombia has been a predominantly conservative nation, and as late as the early twentieth century the cathedral was Bogotá’s agora of political discussion.39 Its old but circumscribed Enlightenment tradition has been reproduced, though, for instance in the White City (University City) of the 1930s, followed by a series of universities after World War II. The country’s famous modernist architect, the late Rogelio Salmona, has in current times been commissioned to provide the city with several impressive buildings of cultural institutions: for instance, the Virgilio Barco Library, a modern kind of palace of learning, and the characteristically inviting Centro Cultural Gabriel García Márquez, close to Plaza Bolívar.
In a way unique for Latin America, political conflict in Colombia has been largely structured around a two-party system of liberals and conservatives, both led by wealthy oligarchs, going back to the 1820s, with allegiances transmitted through family inheritance to a not insignificant extent until today. Long civil wars have continued to plague the country in the twentieth century, usually won by the conservatives. The communist FARC guerrillas grew, in 1964, out of remnants of the liberal guerrillas in the Violencia, with capital V, which erupted after the assassination of the progressive and non-elite Liberal presidential candidate Jorge Eliécer Gaitán in 1948.
In Bogotá the murder caused the most massive and violent urban riots in the history of the Americas. Among the buildings destroyed were the Palace of Justice and the central railway station, which led to the end of railways in Colombia. Another effect of the Bogotazo was the flight of the middle and upper classes from the city centre, mainly to the northeast of the city and to the Andean slopes. This means that a few blocks from the political centre of the country are some of the most dangerous, dilapidated streets of the city, the worst one known as the Bronx.* A visitor to the Plaza Bolívar today is reminded of the destruction of the Palace of Justice in 1985, in a mysterious, non-revolutionary guerrilla operation crushed by military storming, killing not only the guerrilleros but also the judges of the Supreme Court.†
Chile was part of imperial Peru, so Santiago was no vice-regal city but the seat of the general-captaincy of Chile and of a high court, a Real Audiencia. By Independence, in 1817, it was a rather poor outback area of the Iberian settlement. However, Chile and its capital can claim some special interest, because it was arguably the first Hispanic American nation-state to consolidate after the convulsive secession, and in routing the Peruvian-Bolivian alliance in the War of the Pacific (1879–81) it demonstrated its capacity to punch above its weight.
