Human Rights in Colombian Literature and Cultural Production

Embodied Enactments

Carlos Gardeazábal Bravo, Kevin G. Guerrieri, Carlos Gardeazábal Bravo, Kevin G. Guerrieri

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000564075
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This volume explores how Colombian novelists, artists, performers, activists, musicians, and others seek to enact—to perform, to stage, to represent—human rights situations that are otherwise enacted discursively, that is, made public or official, in juridical and political realms in which justice often remains an illusory or promised future.

In order to probe how cultural production embodies the tensions between the abstract universality of human rights and the materiality of violations on individual human bodies and on determined groups, the volume asks the following questions:

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• How does the transmission of historical traumas of Colombia's past, through human rights narratives in various forms, inform the debates around the subjects of rights, truth and memory, remembrance and forgetting, and the construction of citizenship through solidarity and collective struggles for justice?

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• What are the different roles taken by cultural products in the interstices among rights, laws, and social justice within different contexts of state violence and states of exception?

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• What are alternative perspectives, sources, and (micro)histories from Colombia of the creation, evolution, and practice of human rights?

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• How does the human rights discourse interface with notions of environmental justice, especially in the face of global climate change, regional (neo)extractivism, the implementation of megaprojects, and ongoing post-accord thefts and (re)appropriations of land?

Through a wide range of disciplinary lenses, the different chapters explore counter-hegemonic concepts of human rights, decolonial options struggling against oppression and market logic, and alternative discourses of human dignity and emancipation within the pluriverse.

Part I

Human rights narratives, micronarratives, and subjectivation

DOI: 10.4324/9781003154167-1

1 Savage states

Literature and human rights in nineteenth-century Colombia

Luis Fernando Restrepo

DOI: 10.4324/9781003154167-2

After Independence, nineteenth-century Latin American societies struggled to define the best suited form of government for a heterogenous, racially and hierarchically divided population.¹ Liberals sought to implement a series of political, economic, and educational reforms such as the separation of church and state, freedom of the press, economic laissez-faire, and secular education. Conservative sectors would resist these changes, affirming an authoritarian state, the traditional values of the Catholic Church, and the interests of large-land holders.² This chapter will examine two nearly forgotten nineteenth-century literary texts by two prominent public figures who turned to literature to address these issues in the nascent Colombian republic. In particular, they appealed to neoclassical drama and the epic tradition to reflect on the limits of the law and the state in the exercise of violence. In this respect, the Colombian case is not exceptional. Since antiquity, Western literature has expressed concerns for justice.³

From the eighteenth-century on, a contentious area of reform in Europe and Latin America was penal law and capital punishment in particular. As Michel Foucault argues in Discipline and Punish, a new episteme in social control emerged during the Enlightenment, from the public executions by the monarchic regimes that made the body of the condemned a spectacle and text for all to see to a more retracted form of punishment in prisons (123). Focused on reforming criminals in a calculated, utilitarian scheme, administering pleasure and pain, penal reform sought happiness for the greatest number of the population, as Jeremy Bentham expressed in his Theory of Legislation. An influential book shaping Bentham’s penal reform views was Cesare Beccaria’s Dei delitti e delle pene [Of Crimes and Punishments] (1764). Beccaria questioned the justification of punishments: “What are, in general, the proper punishments for crimes? Is the punishment of death really useful or necessary for the safety or good order of society? Are tortures and torments consistent with justice?” (45).⁴

The new rationality in penal law advanced by Charles Louis Montesquieu, Beccaria, and Bentham was introduced by Latin American jurists like Manuel de Lardizábal y Uribe (Tlaxcala, Mexico 1739 – Madrid 1829) (Zaffaroni 528). In Colombia, Vice President Francisco de Paula Santander incorporated Bentham’s Treatise of Legislation in the university curriculum in 1825, although it was banned shortly after by Simon Bolívar, and reinstated later by mid-century radical liberal governments (Jaramillo Uribe 135). The clash of traditional and social reform forces would be reflected in the attempts to abolish the death penalty. Eliminated by the mid-century liberal governments and the 1863 constitution, the death penalty was reinstated by the 1886 conservative constitution and finally revoked entirely in 1910. However, it is necessary to recognize that thousands of extrajudicial killings ensued by military, paramilitary, and revolutionary armed groups during the mid-twentieth century civil war known as La Violencia and the following 50-year-long armed conflict that reached a peace accord in 2016. The responsibility of the state in this great loss of lives needs to be examined critically. For this reason, it is important to pay attention to the discussion on the limits of state authority that goes back to the founding years of the republic and to recognize this culture of violence.⁵

In nineteenth-century Colombia, the limits of the law and the state were addressed at the constitutional level, and they also were at the root of several armed conflicts. The region would see at least twelve constitutions, including those of Socorro (1809), Cundinamarca (1811), Gran Colombia (1819 and 1821), The Republic of New Granada (1830, 1832, 1843, 1848), the Grenadine Confederation (1858), the United States of Colombia (1863), and the Republic of Colombia (1886). Among the main armed conflicts that the country faced were the early clashes between centralists and federalists during the period known as the “Patria Boba” (1812–1816), the War of the Supremes (1839–1842), the civil wars of 1851, 1860–1862, 1876–1877, 1885, and the One Thousand Days War (1899–1902).⁶ Literary scholars and readers may be familiar with the ironic depictions of these conflicts in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, where Coronel Aureliano Buendia “organized thirty-two uprisings and he lost them all” (113). This literary incursion into politics is not unusual but rather part of a long-standing Latin American tradition where public intellectuals and state leaders have turned to literature to articulate their political and social justice ideas.

The law and the state in nineteenth-century literature are two topics that merit attention, complementing scholarship on the period focused on the role of literature in the modernization projects, nation-building, and the production of disciplined and productive citizens.⁷ In this essay, I will examine the expression of the nineteenth-century discussion on the limits of the law and the state in the literary works Sugamuxi (1826) by Luis Vargas Tejada (1802–1829) and Akimen Zake o la conquista de Tunja (1858) by Próspero Pereira Gamba (1825–1896).⁸ Both authors were poets, playwrights, and public intellectuals, as well as political leaders. Vargas Tejada served as secretary for Vice President Francisco de Paula Santander and secretary of the senate. In 1828, he participated in the constitutional assembly in Ocaña and was later implicated in the September conspiracy against President Simón Bolívar, who had assumed dictatorial powers.⁹ Persecuted for the failed rebellion, Vargas Tejada had to flee the country and died crossing a river on his way to Venezuela. Pereira Gamba was a lawyer and congressman, freemason, and member of the Republican School (Escuela Republicana), one of the liberal democratic societies that, inspired in the European social reform movements like the 1848 French revolution, brought together the educated elite and the popular sectors to address social justice issues—freedom of the press, religious freedom, legal equality, abolition of the death penalty and slavery, etc. A firm advocate for racial and gender equality, Pereira Gamba also challenged the special legislation for the two most powerful institutions in Spanish America, the military and the church, as he explains in Tratado sobre el principio de la igualdad [Treaty on the Principle of Equality] (1850):

It is necessary to level the military and the priests with the people in order to become one single mass, subject to the same laws, with equal rights and duties; and without the monstrous contradiction valuing some more than others, against equity and justice.¹⁰

(62)

To advance their political philosophies and social justice ideas, Vargas Tejada and Pereira Gamba turned to literature, recreating the “savage states” of the pre-Hispanic and colonial eras to discuss the authority of the state and the limits of the law and questioning, in particular, a central topic in human rights discourse—capital punishment—through dramas and epic poems that represented human sacrifices or ruthless public executions by the conquistadors. If we take into consideration that the uneven development of the Latin American system of rights (political, civil, and social) in the nineteenth century, as Cristina Rojas suggests, the literary incursions into penal law broadened the rights discussion beyond the legal realm (297).¹¹ The literary imagination tapped into controversial legal matters that are still issues of debate in today’s human rights discourse, such as the right of the state to kill and the presupposed sacredness of life inherited from the Judeo-Christian tradition.¹²

Although both liberal authors advanced a progressive agenda in civil rights setting limits to state power, it is essential to highlight two shortcomings in their social reform projects regarding the subaltern groups, related to the coloniality of citizenship that Cristina Rojas identifies in nineteenth-century Colombia (298). First, the revolutionary call for liberty and equality for all was soon seen as too radical by both liberal and conservative sectors of the elite—distancing them from what both perceived to be an unruly underclass: artisans, urban poor, peasants, Indigenous peoples, Afro-Colombians, and mixed-raced groups. The call for the will of the people was put on hold to secure stability—in other words, to preserve, to a great extent, the colonial status quo sans the Spanish political control.¹³ This is evident in the literary works we will examine where the popular sectors are seen as bloodthirsty crowds celebrating public sacrifices and executions. Second, however progressive their liberal social reform views were, Vargas Tejada and Pereira Gamba’s literary depictions of the native Muisca as a vanquished people is quite problematic. Although decimated, Hispanized, and settled in towns by the seventeenth century, Muisca communities had endured Spanish colonialism and were able to hold on to some community lands until Independence. Under the republic, the government split the common lands into individually owned plots, seeking to give the (male) natives the property needed to exercise full citizenship. The consequences of this land partition for the nineteenth-century Muisca communities were devastating. To this date, they have been litigating for the restitution of common lands and recognition as Indigenous people (Correa Correa 141–142). This story of endurance is hardly recognized by the literary establishment in Colombia. An idealized but lost native past seems much more palatable for an elite whose privileges, including the time to read literature, are based on the exploitation and marginalization of Indigenous peoples and other subaltern populations.¹⁴

There is, however, more than a melancholic drive in the two works examined here. I argue that these literary works project nineteenth-century issues to a remote past to be able to address topics too thorny for open political debate at the time. Literature created a negotiating space and thus helped to advance social justice and human rights in an era known for its innovation in new forms of government and justice, including the American and French revolutions, the declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, and the penal law reform advanced by Beccaria and Bentham.

Sugamuxi: Neoclassical aesthetics and tempered nationalism

Sugamuxi: tragedia en cinco actos (1826) is a five-act neoclassical drama written in hendecasyllables about the defeat of the native Muisca kingdom and the destruction of the Temple of the Sun by the conquistadors in the sixteenth century. Vargas Tejada’s drama centers on the moral flaws of the native high priest Sugamuxi. The plot follows the classical Aristotelian unities of action, time, and space—a dramatic tradition revived by neoclassical French playwrights such as Racine, Moliere, Corneille, and other seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writers. In his history of Spanish American poetry, Marcelino Pelayo notes that neoclassical plays by Voltaire and others were popular in Bogotá during Vargas Tejada’s time (446). The Creole imitatio of neoclassic literature, however, is an innovative aesthetics that turns to the Native American past to address nineteenth-century political issues concerning the new republics. Vargas Tejada employed two classical topoi in his play to express critical distance from the church and the popular national sentiments and religious beliefs: hamartia and pietas.

American hamartia

Like in the Greek tragedies, hamartia, the moral flaw of the high priest Sugamuxi, will bring great misfortunes and destruction to the Muisca people. The drama starts on the eve of the Spanish conquest. News of the cruelty and destruction of the approaching conquistadors arrives at the Temple of the Sun. Nothing seems to stop them, and the bravest warriors have already been defeated. The only hope is divine intervention. For his virtuous and self-restrained reputation, Sugamuxi is considere...