Simón Bolivar’s latinamericanism: unity, social inclusion and exclusion in “The Jamaica’s Letter”

Authors

  • Miguel Enrique Morales Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile

Abstract

This paper offers a reading on Simón Bolívar’s Latin Americanism from his main essay, “The Jamaica’s Letter” (1815). By “Political Latin Americanism” I refer to the dream of all “Our America” republics’ united into a bigger one, the magna patria, whose recognized founder is Simón Bolívar. Through an analysis on his postulates, contrasted with some interpretations of this, I propose that Bolivar’s Latin Americanism is a discourse that, in a political and social level, aimed for a society in which many social groups were excluded. With the goal of arriving to this hypothesis, in the first section I try to systematize the features of the Liberator’s Continental Dream. Then, I study the construction of the Latin American identity of “us” by Bolívar, which allows an understanding of the social exclusion mechanisms that I analyze in the final section.

Keywords:

Latin Americanism, Bolívar, Latin American Unity, Us, Social inclusion and exclusion