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America's Most Awkward Statues

2022-09-25T10:42:03.954Z


In recent years, conquerors, soldiers and warlords have been lowered from their pedestals by demonstrators or by the governments themselves, who face a growing debate about symbols and must define what to do with ancient monuments, what they represent and what place they deserve.


In March 2011, during an official visit to Argentina, then President Hugo Chávez saw the statue that stood behind the Casa Rosada and asked: "What is that genocide doing there?"

It was a sculpture of Christopher Columbus about six meters high and weighing 38 tons, made of Carrara marble, located there for almost a century.

“Columbus was the leader of an invasion that produced not a massacre, but a genocide.

You have to put an Indian there,” Chavez said.

For the officials who accompanied him, citizens of a country where it is still repeated that Argentines descend from ships, that figure had perhaps never been uncomfortable until that moment.

But they took note of his words.

Chávez's comment was not only a trigger for the removal of the monument dedicated to the Genoese sailor in Buenos Aires —a measure taken by the Government of Cristina Kirchner in 2013 and unleashed a long controversy and a legal battle with the Italian community—, but also the symptom of a time when the societies of America, and some of their leaders, began to put into discussion in a more or less central way the symbols that have dominated urban spaces for decades.

Sometimes a manifestation of impotence, sometimes demagoguery, sometimes the sudden discovery of a way of showing history and of a resistance that had been there for quite some time, but on the margins.

“Statues always speak of whoever placed them,” Peruvian author Marco Avilés, a columnist for the

Washington Post

, wrote in 2020 after a series of attacks on Confederate monuments and figures of Christopher Columbus during anti-racist protests in the United States.

In his text, Avilés tells about the hammering down of a sculpture of the conqueror Diego de Mazariegos in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Mexico, in October 1992. That statue had been placed 14 years earlier in front of the Casa Indígena by order of the mayor. , to celebrate an anniversary of the founding of the city.

“Consulting indigenous or black people is not a widespread custom among the elites that now govern Latin America, and it was worse four decades ago,” writes Avilés.

03:46

America's Most Awkward Statues

On video, The fall of the most symbolic statues of the continent.

Video: EPV

Lowering or damaging monuments is not something new, but since the end of 2019, when the protests in Chile marked the beginning of a wave of social unrest throughout the continent, it ceased to be an extreme, marginal gesture, and became a kind of feverish revisionist current that swept through the region with hammer blows.

And an expected challenge.

In Santiago, the sculpture of General Baquedano —a soldier who participated in the campaigns against the Mapuche and is considered a hero of the War of the Pacific— became an icon of the citizen revolt.

It was painted and repainted, flagged, turned white and proclaimed: the most notable of the more than a thousand monuments damaged in those months.

In Mexico City,

The statue of Christopher Columbus that was on Paseo de la Reforma - the most important avenue in the city - was quickly removed on the night of October 10, 2020, due to rumors that some groups planned to destroy it on October 12.

That same year a series of demolitions of statues began in Colombia that reached its peak during the 2021 National Strike, when they lowered the sculpture of the conqueror Sebastián de Belalcázar in Cali and continued with Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada in Bogotá —founder of the city. —, Christopher Columbus, Isabel the Catholic and even Simón Bolívar.

During the last two years, the pandemic has at times mitigated the fire of social protest on the continent and offered a respite to the monuments, but the health crisis has ceased to occupy a central place in public life and pending issues return to come out afloat

This month, the Cali mayor's office has decided to restitute —and resignify— the statue of Belalcázar, and Chile has reinstalled the statue of Manuel Baquedano, already restored, in the Military Historical Museum, although its final destination is not clear.

While the increase in the cost of living once again heats up the spirits in the streets of the region, and a new October 12 approaches, the discussion about how and with what symbols history is remembered in the cities of America is still open.

Mexico and Argentina: a Columbus in the closet

In 2013, two years after Hugo Chávez's visit to the Argentine capital, the government of Cristina Kirchner finally removed the statue of Christopher Columbus from its site and replaced it with one of Juana Azurduy, the independence heroine who fought against the monarchy. Spanish for the emancipation of the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata.

Members of feminist groups, mothers of the disappeared, relatives of femicide victims intervened the pedestal where the statue of Christopher Columbus was located in Mexico City.

Nayeli Cruz

The change raised blisters in the Italian community in the country.

Its members recalled that they had been the donors of the statue of Columbus more than a century ago and demanded a new location to match the character.

The process was not easy.

Columbus was out in the open for more than two years, divided into multiple fragments and caught in an arduous political debate.

The opposition criticized what it considered a decision disaffected by history;

the Government hid behind historical revisionism and the need to respect the memory of the original peoples.

The marble Colón finished finding a site in 2017. The Government erected a pedestal on the north shore of the Río de la Plata, among fishermen, walkers and food stalls that fill up with people on weekends.

Since then, the statue looks towards Europe, as it did before the transfer, with its face attentive to the waves and open to storms.

A site only suitable for sailors.

A progressive government was also responsible for removing the statue of Christopher Columbus installed on the Paseo de la Reforma in Mexico City, but the measure was not turned into an epic gesture, but one of evasion;

One way to avoid a problem: on October 10, 2020, two days before the commemoration of the Genoese's arrival in America, the city authorities had the bronze sculpture removed.

The unofficial version is that they did it so that the Colón would not be destroyed by protesters on October 12.

However, weeks later, it was announced that the figure was kept in a warehouse where it was going to be intervened for its conservation, and that after these works it would be relocated to another place.

These decisions opened the debate on the relevance of the statue in the 21st century.

The groups protesting against Columbus claimed that it was "a tribute to colonialism" and that its relevance should be reviewed.

His retirement coincided with the 500th anniversary of the fall of Tenochtitlan to the Spanish conquerors.

Unlike what happened in Argentina, there were no claims in favor of keeping the statue on the main avenue of the Mexican capital, but its fate remained unknown.

Next month it will be two years since the figure of Columbus — which was installed in 1875 — was removed from the streets.

"It will be given a place, it is not about hiding the sculpture," the city's head of government, Claudia Sheinbaum, said last year about its relocation.

The roundabout that Colón occupied now houses the Monumento de las Mujeres que Luchan, an impromptu demonstration by various feminist groups that have appropriated the site to protest against male violence.

The Government had plans to install another type of sculpture, but the plans remain frustrated until now.

Chile and Colombia, from the streets to the museums

In September 2020 in Popayán, capital of the Colombian department of Cauca and one of the most powerful cities in the Viceroyalty of New Granada, a group of indigenous people from the Misak community pulled down an equestrian statue of the Spanish conquistador Sebastián de Belalcázar that had been located in the site of a pre-Columbian cemetery, so it was seen as a humiliation.

They did it three months after the Movement of Indigenous Authorities of the South West released a statement in which the so-called Children of Water or descendants of Cacique Puben staged a "trial" of Belalcázar.

The statue of Spanish conquistador Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada is torn down by indigenous people during protests in Bogotá, Colombia, on May 7, 2021.Anadolu Agency (Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

Half a year later, when the country was shaken by social protests in the midst of a national strike, once again a misak group from the movement of Indigenous Authorities of the South West demolished the statue of Belalcázar in Cali, the country's third largest city, near Popayán .

“We lay down Sebastián de Belalcázar in memory of our chief Petecuy, who fought against the Spanish crown, so that today his grandsons and granddaughters continue fighting to change this criminal government system that does not respect the rights of mother earth,” they explained then.

Ten days later, after arriving in Bogotá, they demolished the statue of the city's founder, Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada.

And, in a less debated and visible way, a set of statues of Christopher Columbus and Isabel la Católica, and an equestrian statue of Simón Bolívar also fell.

These monuments and actions have left behind a trail of reflections and public policy dilemmas that have been resolved differently, as part of a process of discussing the meaning of the conquest in a mostly mestizo country.

In Cali, a decree ordered the statue to be reinstalled with a plaque that should recognize "the victims of the Spanish conquest."

Bogotá has chosen to take the fallen figures to museums, leaving the effects of the falls visible, in order to leave the debate open.

Preserving the marks of war on the sculptures seems like a clever way of reconciling the multiple meanings that a monument that has been intervened or demolished during a social protest acquires, but it is not applicable to any scale.

In Chile, in the four months following October 2019, 1,353 heritage assets suffered some type of damage throughout the country, according to a cadastre from the National Monuments Council.

Dozens of them were completely lost, retired or replaced.

The most symbolic extraction due to its location in the epicenter of the riots was the sculpture of General Manuel Baquedano.

The bronze work erected almost a century ago in Santiago's Plaza Italia was removed from its site in March 2021 after a group tried to cut the legs of the horse on which the soldier is posing.

After an exhaustive restoration work, the sculpture has been reinstated this week in the Historical and Military Museum (MHN) at the request of the Army.

The other six pieces that make up the sculptural ensemble, also seriously damaged, are stored in the museum waiting to be restored.

The statue of Queen Isabel La Católica is seen dressed as a cholita during a protest called by the feminist group "Mujeres Creando" on October 12, 2020 in La Paz, Bolivia.Gaston Brito (Getty Images)

Attacking sculptures was a common practice during the demonstrations.

In most cases they were scratched with proclamations, but in the most extreme cases they destroyed monuments, mainly of figures of European colonization or Chilean military.

In the center of the northern city of Arica, for example, they destroyed a bust of Christopher Columbus made of marble, donated by the Concordia Itálica Society in 1910, on the centenary of Chilean independence.

The municipality was in charge of protecting the pieces.

In La Serena, 400 kilometers north of Santiago, a statue of Spanish conquistador Francisco de Aguirre was torn down and burned, later replaced by that of a Diaguita woman nursing a baby.

United States: Against Confederates and Colonialists

Statues seen as symbols of slavery and racism have caused controversy in the United States for decades, but in recent years the battle over the symbols has intensified.

In 2017, Charlottesville's decision to remove the statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee led hundreds of torch-bearing neo-Nazis and white supremacists to the site, prompting a counter-protest from city residents.

A 32-year-old woman was run over by a neo-Nazi's car.

Following the riots, and Trump's equidistant response, dozens of plaques and statues honoring General Lee and other prominent members of the Confederate side, which defended slavery in the Civil War, were torn down, damaged or removed.

The one in Charlottesville was withdrawn four years after the supremacist revolt.

That vindictive flame against institutionalized racism was rekindled in the spring of 2020 after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis at the hands of the police.

A statue of Confederate President Jefferson Davis was toppled in Richmond, Virginia, and also in that city, which was the Confederate capital during the war, statues of Generals JEB Stuart, Stonewall Jackson and Lee himself were attacked.

Confederate monuments in Alabama, Louisiana, North Carolina, and South Carolina, among others, were torn down or painted over as well.

The statue of Christopher Columbus in Boston's Christopher Columbus Park was vandalized by protesters who removed his head on June 10, 2020. Boston Globe (Boston Globe via Getty Images)

Especially in this last wave, the protests have put in the spotlight the statues in memory of those who consider the architects of colonialism.

An anti-racism demonstration in San Francisco in June 2020 toppled a statue of Fray Junípero Serra, founder of the early California missions.

The one in Los Angeles was also demolished by indigenous activists.

But the one most noted for that vindication against colonialism was and continues to be Christopher Columbus, despite the fact that he did not set foot in North America.

Also in June 2020, the statue of Columbus in Boston was decapitated;

the one in Richmond (Virginia), was uprooted and thrown into a lake;

the one in Saint Paul (capital of Minnesota), was demolished and the one in Miami, full of protest graffiti by the Black Lives Matter movement.

A new social subject: the Peruvian realists

In Peru, Christopher Columbus still has his head.

He has not been knocked down by ropes nor has he ended up in a warehouse.

But every October 12, it is discussed whether the marble statue of him, inaugurated two centuries ago, should remain plump in downtown Lima, with an indigenous woman at his feet.

Vladimir Velásquez, director of the ancient Lima cultural project, maintains that citizen discontent towards the Genoese navigator has manifested itself in a symbolic attack.

“The most vandalized sculpture in the Historic Center is that of Columbus.

It hasn't been smashed to pieces, but it has been sprayed with red paint on several occasions, alluding to the pools of blood that were unleashed in colonial times,” he says.

In October 2020, fifty activists sent a formal request to the Municipality of Lima for the statue of Christopher Columbus to be removed and taken to a museum.

“We are not in favor of its destruction, but we are in favor of giving it a historical dimension.

A place of memory about colonialism should be built”, says the lawyer Abel Aliaga, promoter of the motion.

The municipal response came by email on May 4 of this year.

It was brief and forceful: it is untouchable for being considered Cultural Heritage of the Nation.

A bust of Fermín Diez Canseco, a military hero who fought in the War of the Pacific, wrapped in black plastic, on the Paseo de los Héroes in Lima, Peru, on Saturday, November 21, 2020. The municipality of Lima for the first time in 485 years ago he took precautions to protect historical monuments and statues, while Peru was mired in a whirlwind of demonstrations. Rodrigo Abd (AP)

In October of last year, however, an unprecedented event occurred: at the foot of the monument a group of protesters, self-styled royalists, stood with wooden shields painted with the Cross of Burgundy, a symbol of the Spanish monarchy.

The group called Sociedad Patriotas del Perú, which has defended the alleged fraud against candidate Keiko Fujimori in the last presidential elections, clashed with decolonial activists.

It did not happen to majors, but there was tension.

There is an ideological debate under the carpet that threatens to come to light on October 12.


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Source: elparis

All news articles on 2022-09-25

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