In the words of the Patronage President, Carlos Alvarez Rodríguez, at the presentation of this first volume, the purpose is to rescue and reread unpublished or published documents relating to the process of Ibero-American independence 'through the eyes of the historian who selects and comments on them in the light of the most recent historiographical interpretations’.
As a matter of fact, this is the first initiative aimed at offering an Ibero-American framework to the commemoration of the second centenary of the independence process, which has already sparked some initiatives such as the official commission set up in Chile to organize celebrations and the one operating in Argentina from the private sector, which published an illustrated volume on the issue in 2002.
In the introduction, Manuel Lucena Giraldo elaborates on the context from where the two documents emerged, namely: Spain in the last decades of the XVIII century.
The first is a presentation made before King Charles III by José de Avalos, signed in 1781 in his category as General Intendent of the Army and Royal Finance of the province of Venezuela. Concretely, he proposes to dismember the Spanish empire, the princes of the Spanish Royal House, to create independent but connected monarchies.
He begins with the empirical observation -but visionary considering the thirty years before the start of the independence process- that Spain will not retain the empire in the Americas for long and adds -under the analysis of then recent process of independence of the British colonies in the north- that 'if the king and the British nation had properly assigned one or two princes of the Royal family and named them sovereigns of the American north, they wouldn’t lament the strangers settling in those provinces’.
The second document is a 'Secret Report’ submitted to the King by the Count of Aranda in 1783, who at that time was responsible for the negotiation of the peace agreement with Great Britain which had been signed in Paris.
He is realistic to warn that the independence of the British colonies of North America -of which 'it will be a giant tomorrow’- will make the Spanish empire in the continent unsustainable.
Realistically but extremely bold for the time, he proposed the King to dispose of 'all the possessions in the American continent but the isles of Cuba and Puerto Rico in the northern part -in fact, this part of the strategy was pursued in the following century as those were the last possessions to become independent- and the most convenient ones in the southern region so that they would serve as ports of call for Spanish trade’.
For the rest of the American empire, he proposes the same alternative as Abalos, although no evidence that they achieved it exists: 'appointing three princes in the Americas: the King of Mexico, the King of Peru and the other from firmed land, taking Your Majesty the title of Emperor’.
History showed neither of them was ever heard.
British historians developed the school of the so-called 'counter-fact’ history and I think it would be interesting to analyze what would have happened if Charles III had made those proposals his own.
Quoting Manuel Lucena Giraldo in the introduction, 'the annals of the empires bear no records in the world of the existence of so bitter, compelling and reiterated a criticism like the one suffered by the Spanish empire, which was born to a fortunate blow of fate in 1492 and buried in 1898 under the breath of a terminal sick person of history’.
As I see it, the school texts in our country should be revised from the Ibero-American perspective in order to modify the excessively anti-Spanish content most of them have. Now, reflecting on the Bicentenary is also a good occasion to introduce this issue which necessarily requires the distance of history.
As a last resort, in the words of Ibero-American Cooperation Secretary Jorge Alberto Lozoya at the presentation of the collection, 'in this case, returning to the past is like forging again the bonds that unite us, validating our vocation for the future and strengthening unity in diversity’.
