TO
l Read Of democracy in Latin Americathe deep and very well articulated study that Santiago Muñoz Machado makes of our constitutions from the Constitution of Cádiz of 1812, and of the political thought that has formed them throughout history, I cannot, once again, resist the temptation to imagine them as novels, the result of the feverish imagination.
There are no pitfalls to arrive at the island of Utopia. It is already there. Non-place is the place. There is such a place, it is printed in indelible ink, or with gunpowder, in the articles of the Magna Carta, as they are called with rhetorical pomp. Governments for the common good, firm institutions, division and harmony of powers, subject to rulers to laws, respect for individual rights, freedom of expression, equality before justice.
But, meanwhile, an insurmountable distance is opened between what the new constitutions, inspired by the ideas of the Enlightenment, and what the reality establishes; The ideal, on the one hand, that creates the illusion of the ruling respectful of the common good and laws; And, on the other, the real world where the leader reigns subject to the arbitration of his will, so that everything becomes a lie, food of the novel.
As Muñoz Machado says in his book, the Constitutions were utopian entelechies for territories that were not defined, countries that existed more than in the minds of the Creoles and in the cartography of the colony, and that would still take to consolidate as national states, or would later disperse into territorial fragments, to give way to smaller countries, put between them in wars and disputes of limits.
Borders still without defining, without exploring territories, many languages, and constituent powers far from that revolt reality where power changed hands, from one leader to another, between the rumble of the cannons and the palatial conspiracies; And in front of the threat of anarchy, the heroes sought to wield the scepter of the emperors, Bolívar the first of them.
Or it was unleash the knot without breaking it
according to the words of Agustín de Iturbide, signing with the last viceroy of Spain, on August 24, 1821, the treaties of Córdoba, who gave way to the independence of Mexico; Librated to obey the Constitution of Cádiz, Iturbide was proclaimed emperor, with ephemeral duration. Kingdoms, empires, caesarean dictatorships. The utopia looked for her libertarian face and no longer found it.
Shortly before, on September 15 of that same year of 1821, the independence of Central America had declared itself to avoid the consequences that would be terrible, in the event that the same people were proclaimed in fact
according to the past sincerity of the heroes, expressed in the act signed in Guatemala. The same captain of the colonial government, Gabino Gainza, became the president of the brand new Federal Republic, very well. And for fear of anarchy, it would not take Central America to adhere to the Iturbide Empire.
We tried modernity, but we could not appropriate the models that were proposed to us. They were imported clothes that we wanted to cut to our measure, the same ones that dressed Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Jefferson, Franklin, Paine; And under those clothes, the leader of the leader, which was at first a character of the lights of the Enlightenment and then returned the libertarian philosophy, such as Dr. Gaspar Rodríguez de France, perpetual dictator of Paraguay.
The novel will continue to tell. What is the history of America but a chronicle of the wonderful real?
says Alejo Carpentier. The Century of Lights is a lesson on the embezzlement revolutions and the failure of ideals, then and after. Victor Hughes, the revolutionary, is the son of Rousseau, but also the son of Robespierre. To impose his libertarian ideas, he himself brings the guillotine to the Caribbean, wrapped in the deck of a ship. It is modernity with edge. Guillotinas, and then execution walls. Utopia by force, which engenders fear, corruption, submission, jail, exile, death.
We keep living it. Because also the twentieth century saw in Latin America embezzlement revolutions, humanist dreams that ended up perverted in nightmares from which we still do not wake up in the 21st century.
With a difference: the distance between the rhetorical ideal that exalts democracy, and the plane of reality where it is scattered, today is shortened, or disappears, as in the case of the Constitution of Nicaragua promulgated this year. No distances, ornaments or disguise. A goodbye to Montesquieu without any sentimentality. The powers of the State disappear, in equilibrium and independent to each other, and organs of the two -phase presidency that coordinate them are made. A marriage presidency, unpublished until today in the annals of Hispanic -American history, a co -president and a co -president who can continue religious forever, immune and unpunished in their happy eternity.
www.facebook.com/escritorsergioramirez
