Simón Bolívar’s lover gains heroine status

[RiverRat]

Simón Bolívar’s lover gains heroine status

Rory Carroll in Caracas
guardian.co.uk,
Thursday 1 July 2010 12.25 BST

Symbolic remains of Manuela Sáenz, who died in poverty, to be reinterred next to those of South American liberator
The woman branded the most famous harlot in the Americas died a pariah, her body dumped in a communal grave along with other victims of a diphtheria epidemic.
It was the price Manuela Sáenz paid for being the lover and fellow conspirator of Simón Bolívar, the liberator of South America. She died in 1856 in the Peruvian coastal town of Paita, aged around 60, a figure of ignominy. Not any more.
Governments across the region have extracted Sáenz’s symbolic remains and are preparing ceremonies to honour her as a heroine of independence.
The remains have been carried through Peru, Ecuador and Colombia and on Saturday will reach Caracas in Venezuela, where they will be interred next week in the national pantheon alongside those of Bolívar. “We are going to unite the remains of our liberator Simón Bolívar with the remains of his immortal companion,” said Venezuela’s vice-president, Elías Jaua.
Ecuador’s president, Rafael Correa, will deliver a eulogy to a woman born in Quito, the capital of what would become Ecuador, after she helped expel the Spanish 200 years ago.
It will mark a dramatic rehabilitation of a figure who died destitute and disabled, barely recognisable from the beauty and political activist who held the rank of colonel in Bolívar’s rebel army. “She outlived her lover by 26 years, none of them very happy, at first a wandering victim of spite and hostility from their enemies, and to some extent of her own temperament,” wrote John Lynch in his biography of Bolívar.
Sáenz, the illegitimate daughter of a nobleman, scandalised the conservative society of her day. Seduced by an army officer, she was expelled from a convent at the age of 17 and married off to an English merchant twice her age. She left him to join the rebels and fell in love with the charismatic Bolívar.
She followed him on campaigns, and saved him from assassination. The rebels ousted the Spanish from the continent but Bolívar’s dream of a single republic collapsed amid bickering.
After Bolívar’s death Sáenz was exiled from what is now Colombia and ended up, via Jamaica, in Paita, where she is said to have survived by selling tobacco and translating letters from North American whale hunters to their Latin lovers.”I think it’s fair for her to get recognition now,” said Pamela Murray, author of For Glory and Bolívar: The Remarkable Life of Manuela Sáenz. “Often she is portrayed as a romantic or superficial figure but she was politically important for Bolívar and a political operator in her own right.”
President Hugo Chávez so reveres the liberator that he renamed the country the Bolívarian Republic of Venezuela. “This is part of Chávez’s effort to play up Bolívar’s importance and to link his own regime to the liberator’s unfinished work,” Murray said.
The president is expected to eulogise Sáenz at the pantheon ceremony. Opposition politicians have complained they have being excluded from the event. “I have not been invited simply because the national government doesn’t respect protocols … nor the legitimacy of an elected mayor,” said Antonio Ledezma, the mayor of Caracas.

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