Latin America Today
Two Hundred Years After the Great Andean Heroic Deed in the South
Omer Freixa Argentinean Historian, Professor and Researcher at the universities of Buenos Aires and Tres de Febrero( UBA-UNTREF) Professor at the Higher Council of Catholic Education Popularizer and Free-Lance Author( Web: http:// omerfreixa. com. ar /, Twitter: @ OmerFreixa)
T
he glorious crossing of the Andean Mountains by the Andean Army, captained by Jose de San Martin, made the liberation of Chile and Peru possible. It would not have been so without the participation of Afro-descendants, and the moment is propitious to rescue a contribution— invisible for a long time— by the people of African origin to that chapter of the national history. January 2017 recalls the bicentennial of the beginning of one of the greatest military feats in human history: the crossing of the Andes Mountains, one of the most evocative chapters of San Martín’ s achievement, which marked the prologue to Chile ' s independence and later of Peru, the last stand of the Spanish crown in South America. This epic accomplishment catapulted General San Martin to glory and was part of a larger struggle process that involved another great Liberator in the North, Simón Bolívar, who emancipated five South American nations, including his native Venezuela. Both leaders met in Guayaquil in July 1822. After that remembered, but mysterious conference, San Martin would begin to bid farewell to the adventure of liberation from the royalist domination. Such adventure was left under the responsibility of Bolivar and his inner circle and their revolutionary effort culminated in 1824 with the battles of
Junín and Ayacucho. The historiography that analyses this time— in line with the stance of building white and European nations during the late 19th century— missed quiet a lot regarding the participation of Afro-descendants in the libertarian campaigns and other war episodes. Priority was given to the heroic deeds by great men( San Martín and Bolivar) and to the great events, such as the military ephemeris. The African-blood people were confined to the memory through their commercial activities in the colonial time, their joy and their cultural manifestations. If African descendants were mentioned as soldiers of independence, the mention was rather an excuse to explain the myth of their extinction in Argentina, not to highlight their great contribution to the revolutionary cause, their heroism and sacrifice, and their achievement of being freed from slavery in many cases. The study of the African descendants’ participation in the nineteenth-century armies was based on poor analysis( Picotti: 1998, 96). However, " All the armed actions in the epic deed of freedom involved the contribution of the blacks "( Lanuza: 1967, 67), as José Luis Lanuza stated in Morenada( Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1946). Although this work has been surpassed by more recent studies, it contains ideas that
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