shares the same characteristics of anger: both the pain of what Gloria Anzaldúa calls the colonial wound,[42] and the pleasure of a revenge exacted through rebellion.
Lope de Aguirre also operates in the field of this social imaginary—not only for the writers of colonial texts but also for those who would invoke his memory later—even to the point of becoming an archetype. Abel Posse, in his novel Daimon, elaborates a narrative in which Aguirre reincarnates again and again, up to the present day, in Latin America. Posse thus examines the direct and indirect echoes of the marañón rebellion on the continent.
While it is necessary to take into account the significant differences in context and political particularities of the various anti-imperial projects, it is no less important to note their similarities. For example, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the double dimension of the liberating/oppressive kingdom of Aguirre that covered Margarita Island and a large part of Venezuela could be associated with that of Hugo Chávez and the Bolivarian revolution. This is just one instance in an endless list of political regimes and processes, both on the left and on the right, that reclaimed national sovereignty from imperial powers and answered the liberationist demands of their exploited people, while at the same time containing tyrannical and oppressive elements—in their rhetoric, if nowhere else. One thinks here of Henri Christophe, Porfirio Díaz, Fidel Castro, Leopoldo Galtieri, and many others.
This book does not propose to draw up a list of similarities and differences among the continent’s many anti-imperial movements—a task that would be at once arduous, contentious, and still simplistic—but to focus on the figure of Aguirre, suggesting possible connections with other historical contexts yet leaving any actual analysis to the reader. That said, this work has not only an analytical objective but also a practical one. For Aristotle, anger, like other emotions, can be educated, and a well-formed imagination plays a determining role.[43] Demonstrating the mechanisms of the Latin American anti-imperial social imaginary can serve as a basis for developing programs that can re-educate us about them and warn of their dangers.
Those who reject the possibility of educating the emotions and cleave instead to a theory of biological determinism may stake their positions on an anecdote told by Charles Darwin. The story goes that one day, Darwin saw a snake in a cage at a zoo and recoiled instinctively, even though he knew that there was a glass between him and the animal and that he could not be bitten. The lesson seems clear: his 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
