1816: Jorge Tadeo Lozano, Colombian Renaissance man

On this date in 1816, Jorge Tadeo Lozano was executed by firing squad in a Bogota temporarily reconquered for the Spanish crown.

Scientist, journalist, essayist and man-about-town Lozano (English Wikipedia entry | Spanish) sprang from the stock of New World Spanish nobility.

He studied literature, philosophy, medicine, chemistry, mathematics, mineralogy, botany; he served in the Spanish military and traveled in Europe; he returned to his native New Granada, where he became drawn into the liberal ferment with a celebration of the emerging bourgeoisie obviously contextualized by his scientific education.

Money, like the blood of a body, gives life and shares with each and every one proportionally the movement and robustness that it needs to freely comply with the action that it must complete as a member of society … This inistrumental motive of wealth can not be hushed, if it is to produce an effect … in the manner of electric flow [it] passes through bodies, leaving them with a glowing heat, also enlivens the arms and hands through which it passes… (Studies in the History of Latin American Economic Thought)

As a member of the constituent assembly, he helped draft an 1811 constitution that acknowledged the authority of the Spanish crown, but not of its viceroy, creating (so its signers thought) a new commonwealth state. Lozano thereupon became the first President of Cundinamarca, essentially the forerunner to the present-day Colombian presidency.

Since Lozano turned out to be a better botanist than executive, he resigned the office after a few months.

Only after Europe had sorted out the Napoleonic wars did the Spanish free up the resources for a brutal reconquista of their errant provinces. But when it came, under a general with the macho nickname El Pacificador, it had intellectuals just like Lozano right in its sights.

Even though he’d been back at lower-profile scribbling since his stint at the top, Jorge Tadeo was just the sort of guy Pablo Morillo targeted for demonstrative executions over the second half of 1816.

Thus perished the persons of the greatest wisdom, the most virtuous and wealthy, in New-Granada. The object which Morillo had in view, was to extinguish intelligence, remove men of influence, and destroy property, so that, in future, there should be none capable of originating or directing another revolution. (Source)

Thus perished Lozano this date, along with another intellectual, Miguel Pombo (Spanish link) among a whole train of patriotic martyrs over the months of Morillo’s rule.

The policy of killing these men to deprive New Granada of revolutionary potential was, however, an abject failure: just three years after these men were shot as traitors to that distant European line, Simon Bolivar detached Colombia from Spain at the Battle of Boyaca.

On this day..

1817: Policarpa Salavarrieta, Colombian independence heroine

This morning in 1817, a Colombian seamstress was shot in Bogota for spying on the Spanish forces fighting to quell South America’s Bolivarian independence movements.

Policarpa Salavarrieta — it was the name her brother used for her; her legal given name and origin are romantically lost — was infiltrated into Bogota during the reconquista, when a Spain recovering from Napoleon’s intrusion deployed in force to quash the separatist aspirations of its New World colonies.

It was the day of Simon Bolivar, but Spain had completed its apparent pacification of New Granada* in 1816, and established a stronghold in Bogota. Subversives had to mind their P’s and Q’s.

Although she was a known agitator in the city of Guadas, “La Pola” could slip into Bogota without drawing attention.

There, she used her skills as a domestic to hang around royalist households, sewing up clothes while snooping around, and helping revolutionaries recruit soldiers.

She was arrested when the Spanish busted the network, (the link is in Spanish) and shot publicly with her lover, Alejo Sabarain, and a number** of others — all men, none of them half so well-remembered or beloved as Salavarrieta. She was supposed to have ignored the priests murmuring te deums in her ear on the scaffold in order to exhort the onlookers to resistance.

Over the years to come, she would become an emblematic martyr of independence; just see how many times her theme is visited in this history of Colombian painting (Spanish again). She’s also the only historical (not mythological/allegorical) woman ever used on Colombian currency.

As will be readily surmised, of course, she merits her tribute because the movement in whose service she died soon rallied and carried the day.

* The Spanish territory of New Granada encompassed most of the ice cream of the South American cone.

** Various numbers are given for the day’s total execution count. This site (Spanish) says a total of nine — Policarpa Salavarrieta and eight men, including Alejo Sabarain — and persuasively names all of them.

On this day..