Boliver, by Marie Arana – review

So here we go again into a heart of darkness:  the humbug and horror which is the history of Spanish South America ever since Columbus landed on the island of Hispaniola. Now modern Haiti and the Dominican Republic, the island’s population had within a few decades of Columbus’ arrival, through genocide and disease, been reduced to barely 200. And that was just the beginning.

No Christian nation has ever trailed such a shameful colonial past, which is why the colonists must feel the need to assemble what they see as its glories. This, the 2,684th book about Simon Bolívar, is subtitled ‘The Epic Life of the Man Who Liberated South America’.

But liberated it for whom? By the beginning of the 19th century only a third of the original inhabitants of the sub-continent, the pure-blooded Indians, had survived. One of them, claiming to be a direct descendant of the last Inca, having raised a rebellion against the Spanish, was sentenced by their colonial authorities to be torn apart by horses in 1781 — except that the horses, who alone come well out of this terrible tale, would not do this.