It is not the first time that Jorge Abelardo Ramos has entered the debates of the Summit of Latin American States, CELAC. His debut was at the meeting of leaders in Caracas in December 2011.
The night before the plenary session of heads of state, the then president of Venezuela, Commander Hugo Chávez, surprised the Argentine president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner in an unusual dialogue that was filmed by Public TV in which they participated as privileged spectators. the ministers of both governments. A meeting where Chávez with the book by Jorge Abelardo Ramos, History of the Latin American Nation in his hand told him:
– Cristina, I was telling you that history up to now has introduced us to the 21st century. Look (showing him the book) this book by Jorge Abelardo Ramos that I am reading now preparing for CELAC…
– Cristina laughs.
– Yes. Preparing, reading, studying. And as some Argentines gave it to me in 2003 they tell me here –reading the dedication- Mr. President Hugo Chávez, November 17, 2003. For a definitive Ayacucho at Winners’ Pass!
Natalia Fossati and Adrian Ruiz. Proud to have danced a tango for you. On behalf of our people and for the Union of the Latin American Nation!
– Look at what Jorge Abelardo Ramos says… a Marxist who understands the National Question. The National Question!
The dialogue continues with Cristina about the revisionist current of history and Ramos’s support for Peronism. The vote for Perón was discussed from the left in September 1973. But Chaves insisted that there is no more important issue than the institutional integration of Latin American countries.
The following day in the general plenary of presidents he told them directly:
– We were reading a book by Jorge Abelardo Ramos. A book that caught my attention because it is called History of the Latin American Nation. And there searching and searching in those pages of that great political leader, Argentine revolutionary, writer, ideologue. He was a Marxist and he was a Peronist. Yes. Yes. And it will develop the national question. Peron-Peron. They were explaining to me yesterday. In some of those pages, he narrates the fervor that broke out in the streets of Buenos Aires when the victory in Pampa de la Quinua was learned in January 1825, which, as we learned, occurred on December 10, 1824. And Ramos quotes witnesses of the time… and he remembers a general who was governor of the Province of Buenos Aires who had to issue a decree to bring order to that delirium in honor of Bolívar, in honor of Sucre. Giants, giants that ended as we know…”.
Jorge Coscia, then Secretary of Culture of the Nation, was in charge of sending all the Latin American presidents of that moment the work of Abelardo Ramos.
“History of the Latin American Nation” stealthily covers Latin America. The loneliness of the great writer Manuel Ugarte, precursor of Latin American thought allows us to observe the transition with Jorge Abelardo Ramos, from dream to materiality.
Nicolás Maduro justified his absence at the CELAC summit and pointed against Patricia Bullrich
“Nothing more important happened, since the wars of independence, than the 1991 Treaty of Asunción when Mercosur was launched,” said Abelardo Ramos in 1993 when he was barely two years old. Mercosur is so powerful that despite the conspiracies and bad press, no one leaves. It has supported the government of various currents and conflicting ideologies, but it is evident that it is not convenient for anyone to be left out.
History of the Latin American Nation has the attraction that it is the political map of our identity. In tune with Ugarte who said: “We are Indian, we are Spanish, we are Latino, we are black, but we are what we are and we do not want to be anything else!”
When Celac was being organized in Buenos Aires and it was announced that Lula was coming, he told me that the new generation of Latin American and Caribbean presidents could not stop reading the bible of Latin American unity. My colleague Jorge Neme, who was Vice Chancellor with Felipe Solá and currently Secretary of Development Planning and Federal Competitiveness, connected me with the Undersecretary for Latin America and the Caribbean, Guillermo Martínez Pandeani and there everything was simple.
What the CELAC summit left in Buenos Aires
The foreign minister, Santiago Cafiero, liked the idea of giving this work as a gift to the invited presidents. I immediately brought the 32 books in Spanish and one in Portuguese for Lula. Dilma had received it in Caracas in 2011. The Brazilian publishing house “Insular” owned by comrade Nelson Rolim de Moura (exiled in Argentina in the 1970s, had joined the ranks of “Red” Ramos), had converted it and printed it on the State of Santa Catarina, but doubts if a copy had reached Lula.
In this case, what abounds does not harm. Maybe he doesn’t need it, but tonight the Brazilian president has the book of continental unity, on the bedside table.
This work provides a vision of a broader historical space than our municipalities and bell towers. It supports the historical continuity of the liberators with the national emancipation movements of the 20th century. And the story is told together.
He deeply analyzes the Haitian revolution, when with Alexander Petión, he defeated the French slave empire and contributed men and weapons to Bolívar and the liberators of South America. And he points out how Petión dictates to Bolívar a social concept that he did not have: the emancipation of slaves. We naturally conclude on the reasons for the Haitian crisis. Ramos maintains that there is nothing more important for the well-being of our peoples than effective unity. Nothing to delay the unit. Being or not being a revolutionary today in Latin America goes through that point that seems simple, but it is not. The big imperialist interests boycott any possibility.
The alliance with Brazil is crucial for Ramos, which is why the ABC (Argentina, Brazil and Chile) that promoted Perón with Getulio Vargas and Ibáñez del Campo is being considered and reconsidered. He would add that Brazil with the Baron of Rio Branco was the forerunner of that unit. Today the ABC is Mercosur, and so it considers it.
“History of the Latin American Nation” places us in the big song. We find comparative conclusions when we read that George Washington in his war of independence against England in his battle banner simply held the motto: “Unity or death.”
In South America we achieved independence at the cost of unity. We achieved the “freedom” of dividing ourselves into thirty-three little pieces. Buenos Aires merchants from all over the continent are happy to trade with England or China at the expense of national production.
paradoxically the traditional left and progress do not promote Latin American unity. After a decade where Correa governed in Ecuador, Evo in Bolivia, Kirchner in Argentina, Chávez in Venezuela, Lula in Brazil, and Mujica in Uruguay, we can ask ourselves what measures were taken during that long period to contribute to the unity of the Patria Grande ? I answer without fear of being wrong that none. The Celac and Unasur meetings dealt with current issues.
CELAC: the agenda after the summit and the bittersweet flavors of the meeting
A Central Bank was not established, an agro-export market was not established in the Port of Rosario, or in San Pablo or Valparaíso. A Market where we can assert the price of our products. Argentine, Brazilian, Paraguayan soybeans… are listed on the Chicago Market! Our competitors say how much our merchandise is worth. In that decade, simple measures such as common citizenship, the homologation of titles were not taken, no progress was made in common legislation, Parlasur was not granted greater legislative authority. Some leaders of the Justicialista Party seem fearful of the Peronist doctrineof the Organized Community, of the Third Position, of Latin American Unity, it is as if that retro progressivism had paralyzed them.
On the contrary, today there is an imprint of more action and less rhetoric.
The book that the Latin American and Caribbean presidents have in their hands is the amalgamation that, as the Mexican philosopher José Vasconcelos said, “we are the cosmic race.”
And Abelardo concludes History of the Latin American Nation:
“Would the modern French Nation have been born without its great Revolution, inexplicable without Diderot, D’Alembert, Voltaire or Rousseau? We, the Latin Americans, are we not about to be 500 million souls? Don’t we have Gabriel García Márquez and Alejo Carpentier, Carlos Fuentes, Octavio Paz and Lepoldo Zea? Our compatriots, aren’t they Arturo Uslar Pietri, Arturo Jauretche, Joaquín Edwards Bello, Manuel González Prada and Manuel Ugarte? Haven’t Martín Fierro, Juan Bosch, Darcy Ribeiro, Alberto Methol Ferré, José Antonio Vázquez or Augusto Céspedes drawn the sky of a common nation? Well, we have everything, if we want to have it, potentially or actually. 200 years ago, Alexander de Humboldt drew up the grandiose inventory of physical America. It is up to us now to dare to put an end to self-denigration and sovereignly face our destiny. That is the purpose that inspires us…”
The reader will not believe that Jorge Abelardo Ramos participates in the debates in person; Died October 2, 1994but for the present times and those to come, his Latin Americanist thought like that of Manuel Ugarte, haunts the entire mestizo America like a ghost.
*VR is director of the digital magazine PatriaGrande.com
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