José María Melo, the forgotten Colombian president whom Petro claims

The historical figure of José María Melo (Chaparral, October 9, 1800 - La Trinitaria, June 1, 1860) has aroused fascination in Gustavo Petro.

During his first official visit as head of state to Mexico, a week ago, the left-wing president insistently vindicated the general, a relatively forgotten character who fought alongside the liberator Simón Bolívar and is probably the only Colombian president whose remains are found in Mexico's territory. foreigner, because he died in Mexico in the ranks of Benito Juárez.

It was an obligatory topic both during his meeting with his counterpart Andrés Manuel López Obrador and in his speeches on Mexican soil.

The third of the 16 points agreed upon in that visit by the Colombian and Mexican foreign ministries contemplates "handling the request for the location and repatriation of the remains of General José María Melo Ortiz, the first popular president of indigenous origin of the Republic of Colombia, who traveled to Mexico to join the cause of President Benito Juárez.

The joint statement adds that these works must begin to be coordinated as soon as possible, before the end of 2022. This way of portraying Melo, however, at least divides opinions.

The figure of Melo has been revered by the Colombian left for his indigenous ancestry, his liberal internationalism, his Bolivarianism and his juarism, recalls the historian Rafael Rojas from Mexico.

“In other words, he is a figure in whose biography Bolívar and Juárez, two heroes of both countries, are linked.

Not by chance, a precedent for the location of the remains in La Trinitaria, near Comitán, Chiapas, took place in 1940, when Lázaro Cárdenas was president,” Rojas points out, recalling that many Colombian liberal politicians have admired Juárez, Cárdenas and the Revolution Mexican.

“I think that the precedent of that attempt to locate the remains of Melo, which failed, in the time of Cárdenas, and which he later tried to resume in 1989, is very present in two leftist governments, such as those of AMLO and Petro, who are trying to emphasize their historical ties through that character”, he points out.

Some historians even see Melo as a radical republican caudillo, in the style of Juan Manuel de Rosas in Argentina, a forerunner of 20th-century populism, Rojas says.

"The interest of the Petro government in the figure of Melo points to a historical memory operation similar to the one we have seen in other governments of the Latin American left, such as the Chavista, the Kirchnerista or the Lopezobradorista in Mexico," he concludes.

Petro, with three months in power, has been very skilful in his messages and symbolic gestures.

Before taking office, he visited the indigenous people of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta and, in the ceremony itself, his first order as president was to have Bolívar's sword brought, among many other examples.

The guerrilla to which he belonged in his youth, the M-19, had a Bolivarian character.

On more than one occasion he has also exalted the figure of Melo to rescue her from oblivion.

“He was the first indigenous and progressive president of Colombia.

Overthrown by slaveholders, he fought in Nicaragua and was shot defending Benito Juárez in Mexico ”, he wrote two years ago in a chain of messages on his social networks.

He also claimed that he was inspired by utopian socialism.

"He led the insurrection of the artisans to build the national industry protecting it from imports, he advanced the agrarian reform until he was overthrown through the conservative slaveholders and the free trade liberals", he added in his interpretation.

His life, he concluded then, "has been hidden from contemporary Colombian society."

During his visit to Mexico, he reaffirmed several of these appreciations.

“He is, neither more nor less, the last officer of Bolívar's army.

In Colombia they are not remembered for that very reason, because they do not want to remember that by decree the slaveholders of Colombia evaporated, destroyed, annulled the existence of the Liberation Army," he said in his meeting with the mayor of Mexico City, Claudia Sheinbaum, when he dedicated his speech to Melo.

“He was erected by the workers, the artisans of the city, as President of the Republic”, he affirmed.

In this view, Colombia "for the first time has a popular government, similar to the one that General José María Melo represented for a few months."

Some observers note a militant look at history that blurs important nuances.

General Melo was the protagonist of a troubled time for the young Republic of New Granada, which had only been established in 1832. In the middle of the century, a series of liberal reforms met with great hostility.

Another general, José María Obando, was elected president in 1853 and that year a new constitution was approved which, among other things, recognized freedom of worship, established universal male suffrage, and gave autonomy to the provinces.

“The attempt to put the head of the army, José María Melo, on trial for the murder of a soldier provoked, on April 17, 1854, a military coup, which sought above all the defense of the army and the authority of the central government and that the president, unhappy with the constitutional reforms, did not confront decisively, although he refused to assume the power that the coup leaders offered him," says historian Jorge Orlando Melo in his book

.

"General Melo then held the government and, seeking popular support, declared himself in favor of the Bogota artisans, in opposition to the free-trade liberals," he points out.

When the reaction came, he ended up expelled from the country.

"The coup, which marked the beginning of a civil war that would last eight months, was actually the point of arrival of a process that began in the late 1840s and marked by the so-called liberal reforms," ​​point out Angie Guerrero, Luis Ervin Prado and Ángela Roció Sevilla in their book

, published this year by the Universidad del Rosario, which brings together hundreds of letters from the time.

The episode, understood at the time as a Praetorian act, began to be reinterpreted from the 1970s, but without empirical information, says Prado, a professor at the University of Cauca, in Popayán, dedicated to 19th century issues.

"That of Melo is basically a government of career soldiers," he points out.

He really has nothing of socialism and has nothing of radicalism (...)

the coup must be seen as a reaction against certain military reforms”, he affirms.

In the hundreds of letters they studied, "there is not a single one that talks about lowering taxes, or distributing the land, or anything like that."

His biography is somewhat more complex.

Labeling him as the first indigenous president "has neither head nor tail," says genealogist Miguel Wenceslao Quintero, author of

.

“He was part of the Granada elite.

Like most of our heroes, he descended from Sebastián de Belalcázar ”, a Spanish explorer and conquistador, he details.

Although he was born in Tolima, both his father and his mother belonged to the elites of their respective towns, Cartago and Buga, which were very significant in colonial times.

In documentary terms, he explains, then registers were made –censuses– in which the categories of 'white' and 'noble' were included.

"Melo's ancestors, his grandparents, are within those two qualities, either noble or white," he argues.

“That he had indigenous blood, of course.

The Colombian elite, almost without exception, because they are so old, have indigenous blood”, he explains.

"To say that he was an indigenous president is a fallacy," he concludes.

The renewed effort to repatriate his remains promises to open more than one debate.

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