Simon Bolivar

In 1797, following a written plea for troops to counter an incursion by an American Revolutionary War veteran into Louisiana, Manuel Godoy, minister to the Spanish crown, made a note in the margin: No es posible poner puertas al campo (‘It is not possible to put up doors in a field’). Both literally and metaphorically, Spain could no longer defend the indefensible. In 2017, the 45th president of the United States signed an executive order to build a wall along the country’s Mexican border. Its construction, for which he perversely wanted Mexico to pay, was a practical and symbolic one. The United States was turning its back on Latin America.

In 1821, while Byron and Shelley briefly shared what they high-mindedly called an ‘artist’s colony’ in Pisa, along with Mary Shelley and Byron’s current squeeze Contessa Teresa Guiccioli, they both impulsively decided to commission the building of boats in order to explore the gulf of La Spezia. While Shelley, in deference to his friend, named his Don Juan (the boat in which he would perish, aged 29, the following year), Byron christened his The Bolivar,in honour of Simon Bolivar, who was then attempting to liberate South America from the Spanish. No stranger to noble causes, Byron would eventually go off to support the Greek War of Independence, dying ignominiously, aged

On 18 May 1781, Tupac Amaru II’s rebellion came to an abrupt and grisly end. Seized by Spanish forces, the Peruvian muleteer-turned-popular-revolutionary knew the game was up. Still, he refused to go quietly. After Tupac’s captors’ horses failed to wrench off his limbs, the executioner reached for his axe. ‘You kill only me,’ legend has Tupac shouting as the blade descended. ‘But tomorrow I will return as millions.’ As Laurence Blair’s Patria assiduously demonstrates, death rarely has the last word in the ‘forgotten continent’ of South America. In the case of Tupac, his narrative of a ‘Peru for Peruvians’, free from colonial oppression, would later be resurrected in radical leftist