Lyman L. Johnson

The kind of lavish and dogged mayhem that attaches to Latin American politics first came to my attention through the story of the Ecuadoran dictator García Moreno, hacked to death by machete on the steps of the presidential palace in 1875, and his most vociferous critic, the journalist Juan Montalvo, who afterward declared, “¡Mi pluma lo mató!” Garcia Moreno’s heart was embalmed and sealed in a silver jar and his body hidden away in a Dominican convent for a hundred years before being discovered and exhumed by supporters.

In the folklore of Latin American politics, writes Lyman Johnson, certain bodies mobilize passions and symbolize collective ideals, and it is usually the defeated, the tortured, the assassinated and the executed that exert the greatest hold on popular imagination. Latin Americans have often discovered political meanings and expressed political aspirations through the lives of heroes, remembered not for great successes, but for their patience and courage in the face of calamity. Humiliation, defeat, and death at the hands of an enemy imitate the iconography of the crucified Christ: death giving life to a people and a nation. And, given the contested nature of political memory, the utility of martyred heroes can be refigured and redefined by future generations.

The stories in Death, Dismemberment, and Memory date from the Conquest to the end of the 20th c., beginning with the beheadings of Atahualpa and Túpac Amaru, which gave birth to the concept of Inkarrí, the belief that the Inca could be reborn from his buried head, leading to the restoration of harmony and justice. The insurrection led by Túpac Amaru II in 1780 was expected to evolve into a cleansing pachacuti or cataclysm that would restore the proper order of the world. (It did not, but it did precipitate the long, slow death of Spanish rule in Peru).

Not surprisingly, many of the stories here come from Mexico, which has its own unique attitudes toward the bodies of the dead. One chapter relates the 1949 exhumation (based on forged documents) of the skeleton of (Piltdown?) Cuauhtémoc in Ixcateopan, Guerrero, a town that still (half-heartedly) commemorates the murder of the Aztec king by Hernán Cortés. The posthumous careers of Mexican Independence heroes Hidalgo, Morelos, and Iturbide reflect the ambiguity of their own attitudes toward the deeds that led to their deaths, and the political turmoil in Mexico for the remainder of the 19th c. The political fortunes of the chameleon caudillo Santa Anna fell after his army’s loss to the Texans at San Jacinto, but recovered after his leg was severed by a French cannon ball at the battle of Veracruz in 1838. The decomposing leg was given a state burial in 1842, complete with urn, mausoleum and twelve-gun salute. Santa Anna came out of retirement for the Battle of Cerro Gordo during the Mexican-American War, when his artificial leg was captured by the U.S. army (it can be seen today at the State Military Museum in Springfield, Illinois). The legends surrounding the revolutionary Emiliano Zapata include a belief that his death was only apparent, and that he would eventually return to establish a new Golden Age (much like the hidden kings of Iberia, or the hidden imams in the Ismaili tradition). The monument to General-then-President Álvaro Obregón contained until 1989 a glass case that displayed his severed arm (blown off by a hand grenade in 1915) and still features the bullet-pocked floor of the restaurant where Obregón was assassinated in 1928 by an artist who had been sketching caricatures of the guests at the President’s re-election reception.

A couple of chapters treat the case of Argentina, which hosts its own fascination with popular saints and the political signification of death and dismemberment, best illustrated by the peripatetic corpse of Evita and the still-unsolved mutilation of the body of Juan Perón, two years before repatriation of the remains of 19th c. caudillo Juan Manuel de Rosas (‘the Caligula of the River Plate’) as a prelude to granting amnesty to the military officers responsible for the Dirty War.

Other chapters look at the suicide of President Getúlio Vargas of Brazil and the capture, killing, and commodification of Che Guevara. The book serves as a generalized analysis of Latin American political folklore, but it also works as a stimulus to a deeper, richer study of specific national political cultures. Other useful titles would include:
Political Suicide in Latin America
The Fall of Che Guevara
Santa Evita
Death of Somoza
An Easy Thing
Divine Violence

and for a circa 1928 rendering of Santa Anna’s career (and racist stereotypes) in cartoon form, see Texas History Movies… (mais)