Eighty years of subordination of the latter to a viceroy who resided in Santa Fe in no way affected its separate identity. Yet, since the time of Jiménez de Quesada and Belalcázar-and with prehistoric antecedents-New Granada and the Audiencia of Quito were separated by a well-known boundary. Thus, in his much-praised Jamaica letter, he gives no allowance to the separate existence of the Audiencia of Quito which he engulfs in New Granada. The Liberator’s concept was viceregal rather than audiencial. 7 But, in general, Ecuadorian historians have not studied the history of Ecuador in the period of 1822-1830 instead, they devoted their attention to Bolívar’s Colombia.Īpart from abuses by the Colombian authorities in what they called Distrito del Sur and the fact that Ecuadorians had practically no voice at all in Colombian politics, nor for that matter, in their own affairs, Bolívar’s basic error was his misconception concerning the roots of Hispanic American nationalities.
This is also the feeling of some Ecuadorian authors, although these definitely constitute a minority.
This attitude is attributable, to some extent, to the extreme popularity of Bolívar in Ecuador since those early times when Peru, New Granada, and Venezuela were repudiating their Liberator.Įven considering Bolívar as the greatest figure in the history of contemporary America, however, one cannot avoid the impression that he did more harm than good to Ecuador. 6 Yet these people-none of whom fails to be very patriotic-do not realize, apparently, that what they are complaining about is, in fact, the very existence of their own country. Similar ideas are commonly expressed by Ecuadorians. 3 In a later work he adds that on separating from Spain, Hispanic America was left “without a national tradition, without soul and without historical unity.” 4Īnother ex-President of Ecuador-who would have been Velasco’s principal opponent in the frustrated 1964 elections-Camilo Ponce Enríquez, exalts in the same vein the glories of la patria colombiana, and attributes its decease to “caciquismo,” asserting that “for every intelligent builder there are ten destroyers who sacrifice the grandiosity of what pertains to the Fatherland in favor of their mean ambitions.” 5 Velasco Ibarra attributes the breakup of Bolívar’s Colombia to caudillismo. In the case of Ecuador it is then, perhaps, pertinent to cite José María Velasco Ibarra, an intellectual who was elected four times as President of the Republic, and whose fifth election can be avoided, apparently, only through amending the Constitution. This obligation particularly concerns those who, in the field of education, politics, or literature, exercise a marked influence on the rest of the people. We can affirm then that a society that wants to know itself should know its own, common past in which it originated, by which it was formed. Even fanatical reformers feel obliged to make concessions to existing realities and the Cartesian ideal of tabula rasa on which to build a new, perfectly rational system which would forever remain unchanging, has succeeded, so far, only on paper. Now, speaking of society-and in particular, of its national form- it is evidently the result of a long historical process, and not the fruit of extemporary creation. These colleagues, apparently, never had any doubts about the usefulness of their own specialty. 1 This is, of course, a typically nineteenth-century Comtian positivist attitude.
It seems our colleagues of the so-called behavioral sciences are strongly questioning the usefulness, and consequently, the right to subsist, of historical studies.
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