Chapter 17
It took a while for the Irish contribution to the liberation of Latin America from Spanish rule to be appreciated in the new republics. The reputation of the Irish had suffered in the aftermath of the inglorious experiences of the Hibernian Regiment and the Irish Legion at Riohacha. As has been shown, however, the Irish also made up the majority of the officer corps and enlisted men who fought in the so-called British Legion and the crack Rifles Battalion. However, the names of the Hibernian Regiment and Irish Legion testified to the nationality of their officers and men, damning the Irish in the eyes of some criollo officers who, because of the language barrier, found it difficult to discern the difference between Irish, English, Scottish and Welsh volunteers.
The anonymous author of Recollections of a Service of Three Years in the Republics of Venezuela and Colombia (1828), one of several accounts written by the Irish and British officers who served in Venezuela, wrote that General Arismendi was much attached to both the English and the Irish. According to the author, Arismendi was ‘extremely partial to the English, and pays them the most marked respect: every thing which he can command is at their disposal, and few circumstances can give him more pleasure or pain than their acceptance or refusal of his proferred services.’ He added that Arismendi was ‘very inquisitive as to their government, manners, customs, state of the army and navy, and similar matters; and delights to hear their gallant deeds in action recounted’ and that Arismendi’s face ‘lighted up with all the enthusiasm and fire of a warrior’ when listening to stories about the Duke of Wellington.1 Despite the fact of Wellington’s Irish birth and ancestry, the author related that
… to the Irish [Arismendi] is likewise much attached, many of whom were under his command in the war of the Revolution. He denominates them the brave blunderers; and has stored up a variety of anecdotes illustrative of that jostle between conception and utterance, the fruitful result of which, under the name of bull, has been recognised as characteristic of the natives of the Emerald Isle throughout the world.2
It is not clear whether this was the Venezuelan general’s honestly held view or whether the author was simply projecting his own prejudices. In either case, the English officer who wrote the book makes an implicit distinction between the Protestant Anglo-Irish officer caste (Wellington is regarded as English, not Irish) and the Catholic Irish officers and enlisted men. In fact, many of the foreign officers who reached the highest echelons in Bolívar’s armies were Irish and came from different religious traditions and social backgrounds. Arthur Sandes was an Anglican from the Anglo-Irish gentry in County Kerry; William Owens Ferguson was a Presbyterian from County Antrim; Daniel Florence O’Leary was from the Catholic merchant class in County Cork; and the families of John Devereux, a Catholic from County Wexford, and Francis Burdett O’Connor, a Catholic convert from an Anglican family, had fought with the United Irishmen in 1798.
Indeed, there was an awareness of national differences, which manifested itself in a healthy spirit of rivalry between the Irish and English volunteers. On 29 April 1820, prefiguring the competitive mood between the two nations that exists today at the Cheltenham festival, a horse race was held on the banks of the Orinoco between Irish and English challengers. Major Thomas Manby of the Albion Battalion, riding a horse called Bargas, and Colonel William Middleton Power, riding a horse called Devereux, went head-to-head in the race, representing the honour of England and Ireland.3
In time, and with the maturing of the independent republics, the Irish contribution came to be recognised by historians. The great survivor of Venezuelan politics, José Antonio Páez, who served three terms as his country’s president, praised the Irish contribution in his memoirs. A shared desire for liberty was emphasised, rather than the more venal motivations of some members of the foreign officer corps. Páez wrote that John Devereux – excoriated by the Venezuelan officers after the mutiny of the Irish Legion – ‘had been rightly called the Lafayette of South America.’4
The Irish soldiers who fought in South America and their descendants, who were proud of their Irish heritage, made an important contribution to the historiography of the independence era. Two of the most important accounts of the wars of liberation in the northern part of South America were produced by Corkmen: Daniel O’Leary and Francis Burdett O’Connor.
Throughout his time campaigning with the great Venezuelan general, O’Leary had assiduously gathered together Bolívar’s correspondence and documents relating to the campaigns against the Spanish. He had even travelled with his brother-in-law Carlos Soublette to La Coruña in Spain, where he met the Spanish general Pablo Morillo, his former adversary and an admirer of Bolívar, who furnished him with documents relating to the war in Venezuela.5 The Memorias del General O’Leary comprised Bolívar’s voluminous correspondence and O’Leary’s narrative account of the war. It was both a biography of Bolívar – and a rebuttal of his detractors’ accusations – and a history of the revolution in the northern part of the continent. Daniel’s son, Simón Bolívar O’Leary, published this material between 1879 and 1888.
O’Connor’s memoirs were posthumously published by his grandson, Tomás O’Connor d’Arlach, in 1895. They remain a valuable source for historians of the campaigns in Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia. They also cover O’Connor’s life in Ireland before he emigrated and his postwar career.
The monumental Memorias del General O’Leary, running to 32 volumes, was a state-sponsored publication, and the tone is suitably elegiac. On the other hand, O’Connor’s Recuerdos de Franciso Burdett O’Connor, which was unfinished at the time of his death, is bittersweet. He does not shy away from proclaiming the merits, including his own, of the Irishmen who fought in the war, but, reflecting his radical sentiments, he also professed himself disillusioned with what independence had achieved four decades after the events described:
In the end, I began to suspect that we were working for the interests of English and French commerce, and I was not wrong. After more than forty years of liberty, the patria and the people of which it is composed are poorer than they were at the start of the war, and this lamentable state of affairs is getting worse every day.6
The publication of these great tomes was evidence of the decision by the nationalist regimes that emerged throughout Spanish-speaking America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to appropriate the Irish heroes of independence for their own purposes. One of the continent’s greatest nineteenth-century historians was John Mackenna’s grandson, the lawyer and politician Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna. He wrote several books about the war of independence in Chile, including two about O’Higgins, based on material that had been preserved by O’Higgins’s son Demetrio. Mackenna’s painstaking efforts were complicated by the fact that John Thomas, O’Higgins’s secretary, would translate his correspondence into English and then lose the Spanish originals.7
The historiography of the revolution in Chile drew parallels between the Irish struggle against the might of the British Empire and that of the infant Latin American republics against the Spanish Empire. The noble birth and the Catholicism of the Irish volunteers were emphasised in the narrative of the revolution in Latin America constructed by the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century historians. Ironically, the Spanish authorities had previously required evidence of noble birth and Catholicism when admitting Irish immigrants to the army’s officer corps and military orders or granting them trading privileges.
In his idealised biography of Bernardo O’Higgins, published in 1946, the Catholic writer Jaime Eyzaguirre depicts the Irish-Chilean general’s ancestors as ‘an uninterrupted chain of illustrious bards,’ whose happiness was brought to an end by the depredations of the English and who were ‘no longer able to keep singing while pain consumed [the family].’8 Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna’s great-grandson, Eugenio Orrego Vicuña, also published a biography of Bernardo O’Higgins in 1946. The first line of the opening chapter describes Ireland as ‘the green Erin of the poets,’ which ‘occupies a central place among the nations that have illuminated history with its rich cultural history, noble and beautiful traditions’ and in which its ‘heroic adhesion to its religious faith was a symbol of its preference to the spiritual.’9 This was written three years after Éamon de Valera’s much-quoted St Patrick’s Day radio broadcast in 1943 – the so-called ‘comely maidens’ speech – in which he spoke of an Ireland in which the people ‘valued material wealth only as the basis of right living, of a people who were satisfied with frugal comfort and devoted their leisure to the things of the spirit.’10
This identification with a physically and spiritually pure Irish race was not confined to Chilean historians. In the first two paragraphs of his short biography of John Thomond O’Brien, the Argentine writer Mario Belgrano traces the Irish adventurer’s roots back to Brian Bórú and describes his parents, Martin O’Brien and Honora O’Connor, as ‘both belonging to the oldest families of the Irish nobility.’11 And in his introduction to his grandfather Francis Burdett O’Connor’s memoirs, the Bolivian Tomás O’Connor d’Arlach portrays his ancestors as brave Irish revolutionaries from an ancient Catholic dynasty who had suffered persecution at the hands of the English. He writes:
My grandfather was the second son of Roger O’Connor, the last descendant of that ancient royal house of Ireland which has produced so many and such enlightened sons, who have given such undying glories to the country, in the parliamentary realm, in the law, in literature, in the diplomatic sphere and on the battlefield, and who have sacrificed their lives as martyrs on the altar of the Catholic faith and for their religious beliefs, which the family had preserved untouched through the centuries.12
Roger and Arthur O’Connor had in fact been United Irishmen; but Roger was also a fraudster and a highwayman. Their ancestors did not belong to an ancient Irish dynasty but were a Protestant merchant family who were recently arrived in Ireland, having bought land near Bandon, County Cork.13
In 1949 Alberto Eduardo Wright published a brief biography of his ancestor Thomas Charles Wright, which included the revolutionary’s own memoirs. The Wright family played a central role in the political life of modern Ecuador. Thomas Charles Wright was a major figure in post-independence Ecuadorean politics. His great-grandson Alberto was born in Belgium; Alberto’s father, Guillermo Hugo Wright, was serving in Antwerp as Ecuadorean consul. The family later moved to London.
Alberto was educated in Europe and was already 17 when he first set foot in Ecuador. He became a businessman and served as minister for public works and minister for finance in the Ecuadorean government in the 1940s. In 1944 a revolution brought down the government and Wright sought refuge for himself and his family in the Argentine Embassy in Quito. They fled the country in the dead of night, bound for Peru. In Alberto Wright’s luggage on the ancient plane that carried the family to safety were his Irish great-grandfather’s memoirs relating the deeds of the Rifles Battalion.14
Governments and revolutionary movements seek legitimacy through the organising of elaborate ceremonies in which the remains of national heroes are buried in the pantheons of the patria. Modern nationalist leaders have learnt that proximity to the mortal remains of the fallen leader, and their immortal memory, confer a historical continuity that can be shaped to their own ends. In the Soviet Union, Stalin developed the cult of Lenin and embalmed his body for the veneration of the masses. Franco turned the playboy fascist José Antonio Primo de Rivera, executed by the Republicans at the start of the Civil War, into ‘El Ausente’, the Holy Spirit in a trinity of images – the others being a crucifix and a portrait of Franco himself – that appeared on the walls of every classroom in postwar Spain.
Nor is modern Ireland a stranger to this phenomenon. It is no accident that one of the most famous events in twentieth-century Irish nationalism was Patrick Pearse’s oration at the graveside of the Fenian leader Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, whose remains were brought home from New York in 1915 to be buried in Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin. An obsession with martyrology runs through Irish history, from Brian Bórú to Bobby Sands by way of Tone, Emmet, Parnell and the signatories of the 1916 Proclamation.
Similarly, in nineteenth-century and twentieth-century Latin America, where questions of political legitimacy remained problematic, there was no greater means of demonstrating the regime’s continuity with a glorious past than a great act of public ceremonial. The physical reinterring of the remains of the heroes of independence went hand-in-hand with the creation of a romanticised version of the deceased in state-sanctioned and subsidised histories. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, authoritarian, nationalist governments ordered the reinterral of Irish heroes of the independence era for the purposes of regime-building.
When Daniel O’Leary died in Bogotá on 24 February 1854, arrangements were made to honour him with a grand funeral in the city’s cathedral. His body, which lay before the altar, was dressed in the uniform of a Colombian general, his sword at his side. The coffin was draped in a Union Jack. Among those present were the president and vice-president of the Republic, as well as the papal representative to Colombia and the United States consul.15 Two decades later, in 1874, the Venezuelan dictator Antonio Guzmán Blanco began planning a national pantheon and ordered that the ruined Church of the Holy Trinity in the northern districts of Caracas be redeveloped for the purpose. The National Pantheon opened the following year, and in 1876 the remains of Simón Bolívar were transferred to the building. Prefiguring President Hugo Chávez, who used the cult of Bolívar to bolster his government, Guzmán Blanco was a populist dictator who did much to resurrect the memory of the Liberator for his own political aggrandisement. To this end he ordered the publication of Daniel O’Leary’s 32-volume Memorias. In 1882 Guzmán Blanco also ordered the transfer of O’Leary’s remains to the National Pantheon.
One of the most striking examples of the way in which a nationalist regime in South America appropriated the memory of an Irish-born figure was that of Eliza Lynch. In 1954 the dictator Alfredo Stroessner came to power in Paraguay, ruling the country for 35 years. The Irish-Paraguayan poet, journalist, historian and politician Juan O’Leary, grandson of an Irish immigrant to Buenos Aires,16 helped Stroessner create a narrative of Paraguayan history which recalled the heroism of Francisco Solano López and his Irish lover during the War of the Triple Alliance. In this reading of Paraguayan history López had stood up to the imperial designs of the country’s neighbours, Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay, at great cost to himself and his family. As part of this exercise in regime-building, Stroessner’s government planned the transfer of Lynch’s remains to the Paraguayan capital, Asunción. Lynch’s body was exhumed in 1961 and transferred from the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris to Paraguay. Stroessner’s intention was to inter her remains beside those of López in the National Pantheon in Asunción. However, the Catholic Church objected and Lynch was instead laid to rest in a purpose-built tomb in the national cemetery, La Recoleta, in Asunción.17
A similar battle took place in Chile over the remains of Bernardo O’Higgins. In 1979 the dictatorship erected the Altar de la Patria in what was then the Plaza del Libertador in the centre of Santiago. It was the culmination of General Augusto Pinochet’s project to take possession of the leaders of the early nineteenth-century independence movement for the military regime that had ousted President Salvador Allende’s democratically elected socialist government in the bloody coup of 1973.
Both Allende and Pinochet realised the symbolic value of O’Higgins, the selfless Chilean hero of independence. The Chilean government had made efforts to repatriate O’Higgins as early as 1844, two years after his death in Lima. A law was passed by the houses of parliament approving the transfer of his remains to Santiago and the erection of a monument in his honour.18 However, the necessary funds could not be found. It was Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna, grandson of another famous Irish independence leader, John Mackenna, who once again raised the issue in the 1860s. O’Higgins’s remains were brought home to Chile in 1869 and laid to rest with due ceremony in a crypt in the city’s main cemetery. Three years later an equestrian statue of O’Higgins was erected over his grave.
In 1972 the socialist government passed a law for the building of a mausoleum in which would be buried the leaders of Chilean independence.19 The government was struggling to build a national consensus in Chile in the face of conservative opposition. It too realised that it needed to appropriate O’Higgins and the other próceres (illustrious figures or notable persons) in an attempt to achieve legitimacy in the eyes of the middle classes. The military coup in 1973 resulted in President Allende’s death and heralded General Pinochet’s 17-year dictatorship. The new regime ordered that the monument to the leaders of Chilean independence, at the centre of which was to be the figure of Bernardo O’Higgins, should go ahead. In 1978 the dictatorship made a connection between the liberation struggle in the early 1800s and what Pinochet and the generals described as the liberation of Chile from Marxism-Leninism during the celebrations to mark the bicentenary of O’Higgins’s birth.20
Today the names of army battalions, roads, schools, towns, ships and football teams recall the contribution to national independence made by the Irish próceres. In Colombia a battalion was named after Coronel James Rooke. In Chile the main avenue running through central Santiago is the Avenida Libertador General Bernardo O’Higgins (popularly called the Alameda), while one of the country’s 15 main administrative regions is the Región Libertador General Bernardo O’Higgins – the only one to be named after a hero of Chilean independence. In Bolivia Burdett O’Connor province is to be found in the south of the country. In Argentina, Guillermo Brown, Almirante Brown, Brown de Adrogué and Brown de Arrecife, all named after the Irish naval officer from County Mayo, are the monikers of four different football teams. In Venezuela the Plaza O’Leary is a public square in Caracas, which is adorned with a bust of the general from County Cork, and James Towers English is commemorated in the town of Juan Griego on Isla Margarita. In Uruguay one of Montevideo’s main streets and a school are named after Peter Campbell. In Ecuador there is a street named after Arthur Sandes in Cuenca. In Paraguay the Avenida Elisa A. Lynch is one of the main thoroughfares running through Asunción. Finally, the San Patricios continued to be revered in their adopted country for fighting to protect Mexican independence.