The denial of the hero's cruelty: Bolívar, the Black Christmas of 1822 and the demons of the Southern Campaign

Abstract

The "Black Christmas" of 1822, in San Juan de Pasto, is a bloody and dark episode in the history of Colombia's independence war that stains with deliberate cruelty the mythical figure of El Libertador [the Liberator], Simón Bolívar, built as a moral and political reference for the rising Andean republics during the second half of the 19th century. The intolerable aesthetics of the violence displayed by the Republican Army in the Southern Campaign against its own compatriots -incompatible with the ethics of war openly defended by El Libertador- has been denied and omitted by most of the official historiography. This article analyzes in-depth the contradiction between the ethical and the aesthetic judgment on the epic figure's cruelty, when it appears as an irrefutable will to make the defenseless enemy suffer, and the role of denial and forgetfulness as mechanisms of preservation of the political function of the hero's myth.