Introduction

The other kind of anarchist history

We are nearly certain that this is the first English-language collection of writings by and about the Colombian anarchist Biófilo Panclasta. We took on the task of compiling and translating it because we find him a complex and fascinating figure. For some, it would be enough of a justification to invoke the still little-known history of anarchism in Latin America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and to say that we were adding one more proper name and a few events to Anglophone understanding of that history. But that is not really what moved us to translate these texts.

Like Biófilo, we claim a Nietzschean inheritance. One of the philosopher’s essays discusses the ways in which history can strengthen, or weaken, one’s life. We invoke it here because we often feel that the current wave of anarchist publications and republications, not to mention translations, contributes to historical understanding in the weakening sense. With each exciting and ultimately tragic narrative, we learn once more that anarchism is a thing of the past. Without meaning to, our erstwhile attempts to rescue an inspiring history for ourselves have the opposite effect. There is more than sarcasm in the accusation one sometimes overhears, that some anarchists of today are nostalgic for the capitalism of the late nineteenth century, or the States of the time before World and Cold Wars militarized all social space. Our sad comrades have so burdened themselves with anarchist history, fragmented and incomplete though it may be, that it seems they think better in hundred-year old-terms and theories than in anything of the present, let alone the future! Well, if we have learned a Nietzschean lesson in what kind of history harms, and what kind heals or strengthens, the proof will be in the book that follows.

There are many standard histories of anarchist ideas, of something called “anarchism”, and more often than not there are courageous but somewhat predictable historical figures who may be pointed to as their proponents or followers. It is no different with histories of Latin American anarchism, translated or not. As some of us have always known, and others of us are only now beginning to discover, there is also another kind of history, of anarchists, strange and solitary individuals whose lives intersect with anarchist movements and theory only in oblique ways. We usually find such individuals on the egoist or individualist pole of the anarchist continuum, but it should immediately be added that there were and are plenty of egoists and individualists who could also be called, straightforwardly, proponents or followers of a doctrine. They do not surprise us. Panclasta and a few others do. (Panclasta made this clear throughout his life; the most explicit written version of his disavowal of all doctrines is in the series of letters from jail written in 1910, with which our selection begins.)

This is not to rehearse some kind of simplistic argument against organizing or organizations. Like some individualists, Panclasta fought alongside organized groups when he saw fit; he also knew how to part ways when it was time, answering to no greater cause than the desire to wander again (which often meant, to escape from the cell he was put in for fighting!). In 1928, at a peak of organizationalist intensity in Colombia and throughout Latin America, he even tried founding his own organization. It seems that they published a manifesto, and not much else happened. All of this is to note that a more anarcho-syndicalist or communist history of Latin American anarchism would completely miss Biófilo, or treat him as a curiosity, precisely for the reasons that we consider him to be a timeless figure.

Three kinds of prose

Panclasta’s own writings were by and large incidental. He was neither a theorist of anarchism nor a consistent chronicler of his own life. The pieces gathered here under his own name can be divided into three types. Some are pithy, almost aphoristic, quick sketches that would have been common in a time when the newspaper and the pamphlet were the best instruments of propaganda. The prize piece in this style is probably “Psychological Sketches of Criollo Revolutionaries,” wherein Panclasta draws up a diagnostic balance-sheet of the character of his fellow Colombian agitators. (We hesitated about including this composition, since neither we nor, we suppose, most of our readers will have heard of these figures. We opted for using it when we realized how effective the style is despite lack of familiarity with those described. A similar sketch is included as part of Seven Years Buried Alive.) A second sort of prose is that of his letters. Although they are addressed to individuals, Biófilo seems to have been conscious that sitting down to compose them and gather his thoughts was a chance to share emotions and ideas in thoughtful detail, not just with those individuals but with posterity. Even when he writes to judges or presidents, his intentions are clear. (See “I do not rectify, I ratify” for an example.) The third sort of writing, of which the best example is his book Seven Years Buried Alive, is characterized by a torrentially dense prose, full of exotic words and turns of phrase. Panclasta turned to this expressive (sometimes purple) prose when it came time to talk about the most intense emotions — or the most horrible memories. Here the influence is less journalistic or epistolary and more that of a decadent late Romanticism. It is clear that, for a man who was not a writer by profession but out of necessity, Panclasta reached for every tool, every style he could to say what had to be said. He blended them, and made each his own. (From a translation point of view, it is interesting to note that this project had us consulting the dictionary much more than usual. Aside from his neologisms, Panclasta distributes equal portions of Colombian slang and archaic Spanish words throughout his prose.)

We have also included several interviews from throughout his life, which, aside from colorful stories, give some sense of his engaging and unpredictable manner of speaking. In the eyes of the Colombian editors of his works, these are probably the most reliable sources for factual information about his life. Even so, they also contain exaggerations and fabrications. This brings us to the last topic.

The anarchist as legend

It is difficult, if not impossible, to separate fact from fiction in Panclasta’s life story. What we know for sure can be summed up rather briefly, and is included in the “Timeline” section of our collection. Here, for our own sake as well as his, we should be concerned more with him as a figure. Reading through these selections, it is easy enough to notice how a factual story slips into an exaggeration, an exaggeration into a misunderstanding or rumor, and from there to something on the order of a myth or a legend. We think that this process, the creation of the anarchist as legend, is part of what our collection challenges us to think about. Of course, it is key that Biófilo himself did not set out to become a legend (he did not choose his name, but accepted it when it was offered). He set out to live his own life in whatever way he saw fit, improbable though it may have seemed in his time and place. If anarchist meant anything in his context, anything more than an adherent to a certain strain of syndicalism or communism or the general anti-establishment sentiment of vague mottos like ‘equality’, it must have meant something like: one who insisted on living his own life, even to the point of becoming a legend.

It is important to recall that, for anarchists of the nineteenth century, anti-clericalism was as key a component of their theory and practice as anti-statism. If the State was the clear designation of all of the apparatuses of brute force and violence with their bureaucratic managers and ornate figureheads, it was the Church that stood in for the vast and murky realm of the governance of everyday life: moral codes, rituals, and stultifying myths that confused free thinking and action about even the smallest affairs. For Panclasta the onetime altar boy, nothing was more obvious than the relation between the imposition of myth at an early age and a lifetime wedded to convention. To break with religious belief and moral codes was, in effect, to live one’s own life in such a way that one might even become a legend. All options were open (they still are).

That is why we are not terribly concerned with the inmixture of fact and fiction in the pieces included here. From the point of view of a doctrinaire anarchism, Biófilo Panclasta was clearly an impure figure. From his own point of view, he probably was more interested in where adventure would take him next than in whether, in his own time or in some nightmarish future, he would be judged and found wanting.

Acknowledgments

Our Spanish texts come from two sources:

Biófilo Panclasta, el eterno prisionero: aventuras y desventuras de un anarquista colombiano. Orlando Villanueva Martínez et. al., eds. Santa fé de Bogotá, D.C., Colombia : Ediciones Proyecto Cultural “Alas de Xué”, 1992.

To this collection we owe most of our book, including the titles for some of the pieces the texts “Life and Destruction” and “Biographical Sketch.”

Siete años enterrado vivo. Web publication in pamphlet form by Indubio Pro Reo (Caracas) / Publicaciones CorazónDeFuego (Medellín), n.d.

This free web publication provided us with the text of Seven Years Buried Alive, which the editors of El eterno prisionero confessed was impossible for them to track down.

We can be contacted at:

ritmomaquia@riseup.net

Biófilo Panclasta: Life and Destruction

Biófilo Panclasta, more than a man, is a way of being, of thinking, of acting, of feeling, of loving, of hating, of killing.

He is the synthesis of the contradiction of everything we carry within. Who has not felt the deep desire to kill, to raze, to destroy everything?

Each of us carries a Biófilo Panclasta within, some more Biófilos than Panclastas, other more Panclastas than Biófilos. His being moves between two irresolvable contradictions: life and death, yours and mine.

Arrogant, intrepid, adventurous, with oracular language in the best Nietzschean style, he broke brains open and pulverized obsolete systems. He is Zarathustra descending from the mountain to bring light, to shake the world. With loquacious and convincing language he left no idol standing. His god is in him, he is his own path, his only reason for being, his only cause, “I am I”, he has neither sect nor flag, he is a freed, egoist spirit, he proposes nothing because he affirms nothing. He was not born to catechize, he repudiates governing and being governed alike; he follows no one and wants no one to follow him, he acts as he feels. His originality is to imitate himself — that is why he is considered the “ideal type” of the anarchist.

We have relied on what information we found to reconstruct the itinerary of this life, of this voice that prisons and exile could not silence. We hope that, one day, we will be able to fill in the places and times of his action that are left blank in this itinerary of struggle and suffering.

Biófilo Panclasta Biographical Sketch

Introduction Biófilo introduces Panclasta

Favorite virtue Struggle

Most hated vice Obedience

Aversion Juan Vicente Gómez

Favorite writer Kropotkin

Heroine Heliófila

Color Red

Drink Chicha

Occupation Adventurer

What is most important Life

Ideal Justice

Ethics Aesthetics

Most hated country Venezuela

Most loved country Argentina

Slogan Equality

Favorite maxim To love is to understand

Problem Colombia

Motto To love life and destroy everything

Philosopher Nietzsche

Cause My own

Duty To show truth in its nakedness

Colombians Pariahs of the law

Advice Each must be his own path

Religion Individualism

Proposal Nothing

Origin The world

Marital status Free

Scent Sandalwood

The right he demands To commit crime

Lover Fire

Profession Destroyer

Revolution I am the revolution

Ten Anecdotes of Biófilo Panclasta

Confusion

He returns from Italy to Holland to attend an anarchist congress convened by Prince Kropotkin in Amsterdam. At the same time, in The Hague, there is a Peace Convention, to which the Colombian government, presided over by General Reyes, had sent Santiago Pérez Triana as a delegate. He was a fancy bourgeois from Zipaquirá.

As soon as the anarchist congress was underway, it was shut down by the Dutch police and our friend Panclasta was sent to prison with no tulips. The news was reported in somewhat garbled fashion by European newspapers; it arrived in Bogotá translated as: “Colombian delegate imprisoned in Holland.” When the news reached President Reyes, he almost had a stroke. He ordered his chancellor to protest in the strongest terms for this assault on national honor, civilized customs, and international treaties. The Dutch government, somewhat confused about all the noise, had no other recourse but to free Biófilo, who right away packed up his bags. Destination: Russia.

A Bowl of Soup and Off to Jail

In Bogotá, where there is supposed to be an unstoppable socialist tendency, he showed up, shaking with hunger, at the inn of a propagandist; he asked for dinner, thinking that by merely saying his name he would earn any favor with an appeasing smile, but he didn’t even get the apostle to sacrifice a plate on the altar of ideas, and he had to resign himself to a few days’ sentence.

A Dog’s Life

One day, in Güepsa, in Santander, he came across a woman drowning some mangy dogs, because she could not keep them. He snatched them up and led them to the hotel, where he fed them.

“Hit me or have them take me to jail; at least these animals will die with less hatred for people.”

Spitting on the Buyer

In Argentina he was offered, through an eminent man, a well-salaried post to stop his political agitations. He turned it down jovially, and a day later he passed by the guy’s house, escorted by a guard, for having been found delivering an impassioned speech to the May strikers.

Anarchic Bohemia

Biófilo Panclasta was carried to the prison on Thursday night. He was drunk and he would not pay twenty-five cents for a bottle of liquor. But Biófilo Panclasta was not in the habit of paying for liquor; and this is simply because he does not have any money with which to pay for it. And drunkenness is a state that is part of his personality as a drinker and beggar.

What was serious in all this is that he went to the presidio ten times in three months, all for the same reason: drunkenness and failure to pay for the liquor he drank. According to the regulations of the Police Code, this repeated offense placed Biófilo Panclasta among the bums. Unfortunately, Bucaramanga has made this discovery too late. It can no longer be sensational.

Imprisoned? Again!

“In Ibabué, Señor Biófilo Panclasta has been confined to prison. The reasons are unknown.”

The Libertarian Prisoner: Between Police and Prisoners

March 1st, 1942, Biófilo Panclasta died for the last time in an old folks’ home in Pamplona.

This man, who “wandered” between jails and billy clubs around the world, ironically ended up thinking that the only ones who had taken mercy on him in his agony were the police officers.

The idea never crossed his libertarian mind that those who carried his inert body to the cemetery would be prisoners: his universal companions.

Biófilo’s burial was well attended, and the coffin was taken to the cemetery on the shoulders of prisoners. It is not currently known if he has any family.

The Fire

After his long journey in Asia and Europe, Biófilo Panclasta arrived in Bucaramanga dressed in an old cloth suit, a white shirt, and white pants that had been a gift from his occasional companion, Rasputin. In his luggage he brought German copies of Capital and The Holy Family by Marx, signed by Lenin. He brought them tied together in a bag as proof of his friendship with the leader of the Russian Revolution. It is said that these books were burned by Father Adolfo García Cadena after the death of the eternal prisoner.

Take Down the Madman

One Holy Thursday, Monsignor Rafael Afanador y Cadena and his whole procession of the faithful were devotionally bearing the flagellated Lord to the tomb when suddenly, Biófilo Panclasta appeared on the balcony of Casa Anzóantegui and pronounced a radical anarchist speech against religion and priests. His last words were “ignorant adorers of stick and plaster figures” and “religion is the opiate of the people.” The Monsignor and his procession turned their Our Fathers and Holy Maries into desperate shouts of “He’s a madman, take him down from there!” and “He’s drunk, to prison with him!”

The Madman and the Clock

People in Pamplona say that in the final days of his life, Biófilo Panclasta was escaping the old folks’ home and, with much pain and difficulty, climbing the church tower. Once there, with shaking hands and a nostalgic gaze, he withheld the movement of the clock’s hands, which so carefully marked the passage of time. The people looked, and said mechanically: “It’s that crazy Biófilo again, trying to stop time!”

Biófilo was good for everything. It’s also said that the mothers of Pamplona fattened up their boys with the threat: “if you don’t eat your soup, I’m calling Biófilo”.

Writings

Panclasta’s autobiographical notes

Señor Aurelio de Castro

I received your letter. Thank you. To be listened to is to be understood. Hiding a prisoner is like hiding a spark. Whatever you throw on it to conceal it, with time, which dries it all up, will only serve as fuel.

The mere fact of addressing these questions to me is already a favor. To know is to judge. And therefore I gratefully answer you:

I was born in Chinácota, Cúcuta Province, on October 26, 1879. My family name was Vicente R. Lizcano, for which I substituted my current name in 1904.

I saw almost all the countries of Europe, but in a very superficial way. Due to the persecutions I suffered, the fear which everything adventurously new stirs up in the spirits of the weak, my sorry economic situation, and even the difference of opinions with my associates, I was prevented from traveling as anything other than a fugitive.

In spite of this, I can judge the general state of things in France, Spain, England, Switzerland, Italy, Belgium and Holland. I studied their factories, meetings, strikes and social movements. And, my artistic temperament notwithstanding, that is what I did with the time I had left given prison, exile and beastly miseries.

Among the revolutionaries I met, for his global importance, I will cite prince Kropotkin, author of the most wonderful work of scientific imagination and erudition that has recently been published. It is entitled Mutual Aid.

Also, Elisée Reclus, who explored the eastern regions of the Guajira Peninsula, Colombia, about which he wrote a work entitled My Explorations in America. Reading this book instilled in many Spanish workers the idea of coming to settle in Colombia. They gave up on their desires when they learned of Reyes’ decree prohibiting individuals of a radical mind from entering the country.

I met Grave, author of The Moribund Society and Anarchy.

I met Malato, author of The Philosophy of Anarchism.

I met Sébastien Faure, Leverine, and Tanvión.

I met Lerroux and Ferrer, whose letters I showed to Dr. José Francisco Insignares on January 25, 1908 and in which they said that the Spanish government was obligated to expel me by demand of the Colombian government.

I met Gori and Malatesta, Ferri and Furati.

But realize that with almost all of these great revolutionaries I had a clear disagreement.

“I am not an anarchist,” I told Kropotkin, “I am I. I do not abandon one religion for another, one party for another, one sacrifice for another. I am a freed, egoist spirit. I do as I feel. I have no cause but my own.”

And Malato responded: “Biófilo Panclasta is not an anarchist, but rather a fierce personalist who, not wanting to be dominated by anyone, wants to dominate everyone.”

One night, December 7th, 1907, I was invited by the “Social Studies” group to refute a conference entitled “Anarchy Against Life” given by Bestraud. The orator expounded the same ideas that form my philosophical mentality. I passed the right to speak to Matta and I waited... Once he was finished, I said: “none of you knows what anarchism is; those of you that call yourselves anarchists, are not, and those that don’t, are.” When I left I was sent right to jail.

And everyone was displeased with me because I have the courage to not adapt to any idea or principle. At most I adopt it.

And do not believe that Europe is a global revolutionary focal point. No sir. Argentina: here’s the nation of outlaws.

I arrived there as the eternal epavé . I have not acquired my ideas through anyone’s influence or book. I connected with the anarchist and socialist youth, I frequented their meetings, I collaborated in their plays, I wrote in their newspapers. And, intimately, many of these revolutionaries went so far as to believe me to be “the ideal type of an anarchist.” But the great social mass did not. My neopagan and artistic soul, my rebellious and individualist temperament, my horror toward multitudes could not instill admiration in this great human foule (mass) who have achieved nothing other than having been hurried from the hands of their masters of yesterday into those that today free them to be under their own weight.

And nevertheless, the police of Buenos Aires focused all their attention on me.

For the head of “Social Order” I was the sole originator of a great propaganda of theory and action that was being made in that capital.

In spite of this security force and my refusal to accept “an independent, just and uncompromising employment,” the Argentinian government did not want to expel me for the sole fact of my being South American!

In 1906 the meeting of the “International Congress of Free Thought” was conceived — it was held that same year in Buenos Aires.

The free-thinkers of this city, because every idea fit under this name, began a long series of preparatory sessions with the aim of organizing the program. I attended these, like everyone who attended, with the status of adherent. But so great was the number of great anarchist orators in attendance that the promoters of the Congress, who were simply anti-clerical, had to change the name from “Congress of Freethinkers” to “World Liberal Congress.” Despite this, they met under that title. Not a single revolutionary attended. I left for Europe long before their meeting.

I believe that among the characters of my particular philosophical form, you will not find proselytism. I was not born to catechize. Egoist as I am, I believe it useless to sacrifice myself for anything; To govern is as revolting to me as to be governed; each one must be his own path; I follow no one and I want no one to follow me.

And if I fight with tenacity and heroism; if I have made of my life a challenge against everything despotic, vulgar or small, it is because on this is based the satisfaction of my soul. When I defend another’s infringed-upon right, or save one condemned to suffering, I fight for myself. To help someone does not do anything but satisfy necessities that are as demanding in me as love itself.

Thus I have no “school,” “doctrine,” “party,” “sect,” “duty,” commitments or connections with anything or anyone. I have, like all men, energies, feelings, passions.

My struggle for freedom is nothing but a passion for freedom.

My love for everything that has life is nothing but a feeling of pleasure, a reflex stretched out toward infinity.

My hatred of tyrants is nothing but the visualized development of the defensive instinct for self-preservation.

Therefore I have always done as I feel.

If there I mingled with the strikers so that they could obtain an improvement in life, it was not because I was a striker, but because through situational affinity, I understood their cause. And to love is to understand.

If further I mixed with the republicans (of Spain you understand), if another time with the socialists, if here with the “anarchists,” it was not for any reason but acting in obedience to a suggestive imperative, as Nietzsche would say.

And what do you deduce from all this?

That the question which you address to me as to a “sectarian” I answer as a skeptic: I do not believe or affirm anything. I live. Obedient to fate, I work with and help her. Can I be a propagandist when I lack faith? Consequently, I propose nothing.

A temperament as revolutionary and as restless as mine, aroused by a thousand persecutions and miseries had to, due to moral reaction, turn all its energy against the weight of atavism that chains my action.

And since that atavism has in its external manifestations the forms of the nature that transmitted it, I attributed everything bad about my humanicidal and cruel education to Colombia. And I set all my energies to the thought of freedom, to libertarian awareness.

I thought of dedicating myself in Bogotá to combative and artistic journalism. Art and Freedom. That is my journalistic program. The revolution for art and art for art’s sake is not a non sequitur but rather a confirmation of the skeptical combatant.

As a gift to Colombia, in spite of my “anarchism,” I thought of attracting to myself the divine lightning of Olympic fury that only illuminates in destroying. And I will conclude by listing each time I’ve returned to Colombia and the reason for it.

January 1901. I came to Cúcuta as a protest against neutrality in the war. They even tried to execute me.

November 1904. I entered Barranquilla to offer my services in defense of the nation. I was named in Bogotá — without pay you understand — First Assistant General of the 4th “Panama expedition”.

Accused of conspiracy, I left by land and on foot to Ecuador, to which I offered my services in their planned war with Peru.

January 1908. Exiled from Spain at Reyes’ request, I arrived in Puerto Colombia with the aim of continuing on to Bogotá, not in order to kill the dictator as they say, but rather with the aim of observing his work.

May 1908. The same gentleman had me expelled from Panama where I had taken refuge, and had the authorities of Panama me deliver me as a prisoner to those of El Chocó.

November 1909. In Central America I announce the appearance of a periodical entitled El Anticristo. And, with the aim of founding it, I went to Cartagena. The governor, De la Vega, kidnapped me on a German steamer, threw me in the hatch, and put me on another ship, requesting that the authorities of Colon imprison me.

December 1909. Aiming to evade the effects of a recourse to habeas corpus that I presented to the Supreme Court of Panama, the police stowed me on a boat and had me taken to Colombian territory, where they abandoned me. The executioner returning the expiatory victim to the denaturalized mother.

In conclusion then, I am in Colombia because Panama wanted it that way, and because I, as one who falls into water will struggle to save himself, struggled to save my dignity from a deleterious moral atmosphere that suffocates our soul, nullifying our character, our will and whatever might be noble.

Finally, pardon these poorly strung together lines, sketched with very good will but in a state of soul that cannot think: I am sick.

I salute you,

Biófilo Panclasta

In the police quarters of Barranquilla, April 15, 1910.

P.S. I haven’t even read over what I wrote because, having a thousand difficulties sending correspondence, I wanted to take advantage of the sole occasion that I have to do it. Correct or interpret what is missing or incorrect.

Biófilo.

Prisons

(Response from Biófilo Panclasta to B. Rosales de la Rosa.)

Your beautifully expressed sympathies have come to comfort my spirit in this, the sad solitude of the prisoner.

But it was not the solitude of things that sunk it in its long and nostalgic meditations.

It was the solitude of thought.

Believing oneself a defender without anyone to defend.

A liberator without anyone liberated.

A man of heart among heartless beings.

To feel alone is to feel useless.

Therefore your letter transcends for me, in a very superior way, the kind of fraternal palliative usually shared in times of misfortune.

My suffering has something of greatness.

I am not I who suffers; it is the living and suffering humanity that paints on the sensible canvas of my soul all the sufferings of its uncomprehended misery.

I am not imprisoned by myself.

If I am feared, it is because they know that my word, as the miraculous medicine of a doctor of the soul, can remove from the eyes of the prejudiced the blindfold that keeps them in the land of the “dark barbarians.”

To be persecuted is to be feared.

And I who can teach nothing and preach nothing, I am feared because like the “firefly fleeing from the light, carrying the light, I illuminate the same shadows that I go seeking.”

For me, prison cannot exist.

Like all tyrannies, it is only in the heart of slaves.

I consider my guardians to be beings of a prehistoric nature. And I despise them.

They are too human!

I am not in the habit of making feline madness logical, and I leave its proof to the empire of force; force is the reason of beasts.

As such, even behind walls I believe myself, and am, free.

Free, free as my thought, neither limitless nor incommunicable.

And as this thought is the language of our souls, I send from here, to you, to that place, all the psychic wealth of my evoked feeling as a tribute of reciprocity on the altar of love that the god of Harmony has erected.

We struggle, but we struggle like Prometheus, for being beginnings...

We struggle against death, that Christianity of life.

Let us live.

For life and with it.

Art and freedom.

That is a path.

Let us live for ourselves.

And let us unite, yes, let us unite against everything weak, everything small, everything vile.

To be a Christian is to be defeated.

Let us be biófilos (lovers of life).

Let us be strong. Like crystal. Light and hardness, hardness and light.

And may others learn.

Without us teaching. To be a teacher is to be a tyrant. Leave thought out like meat.

Have no duties. Leave that to the moralists.

We alone, among those who go alone, let us each walk our path; personally; intensifying life, increasing pleasure, feeling existence...

Living.

For man is not born but to live.

And to live is not to suffer.

Because life is beautiful!

It can be beautiful!

Let us make it beautiful!

Be biófilos!

Let us be that!

Cheers!

Biófilo Panclasta.

Barranquilla Police Station, April 19, 1910.

Biófilo Panclasta Speaks

Señor Aurelio de Castro — Presente

Yesterday an issue of your journal passed into my hands and, believe me, your writing surprised me agreeably. Politically, you will understand.

And I tell you I found it strange because your name is known to me as a conservative and to be conservative is to not be a fighter, not an oppositionist, not a rebel.

But Yakaoma has already said it: take a man’s freedom away from him and he will turn into the staunchest enemy of slavery.

And it is in this way that I believe an attitude to be sincere. Freedom is a physical state in the political order. To be oppressed is to have the right of not being oppressed. To fight for that is to be a lover of freedom.

On the other hand, the so-called libertarian liberals are nothing but idealists. From fact they make an idea and they run after it as if running after their own shadow.

“Therefore I do not accept parties of theories but rather parties of interests. All those of us who groan under the same weight, even with different ideas and aspirations, have a common cause, that of our freedom and that is why we unite for battle, without any commitment other than victory.”

From here, it should not be strange to you that I, officially anarchist, socialist, etc., etc., would address you, of conservative opinion, for I will repeat that there are no conservative men, no liberals. There are only situations of below and situations of above.

And I write you in the name of these very situational interests.

My situation is the same as yours. It is only that mine is more violent.

I find myself imprisoned here, where I was brought from Honda. And I think I will be exiled. Nothing can justify such an assault.

Because in the case of my being an anarchist — which I am not, if by anarchism one understands Ferrerism — not having committed any punishable act, I do not see what excuse the government has to impose against a thinker an imprisonment that it would embarrass even Torquemada.

In Colombia I am not even known as a writer. Not even a single letter has been published in this country from which I have been exiled for thirteen years .

The crime committed against me is in fact not even a crime against the free transmission of thought, but rather a horrific attentat against the possibility of the intention to think.

And it is for this reason that in the name of dignity, of civilization, of the liberatory task of the press, of human, political and journalistic solidarity, I address my voice to request in my case the support that you believe you would solicit, if you found yourself in my circumstances. And in the same spirit I beg of you to come visit me in prison, if it does not go against your sensibility.

I am your attentive, sure, and fellow,

Biófilo Panclasta

Barranquilla, April 11, 1910.

P.S. Here goes a game of letters...

V.

On the Way

Señor Director of El Pueblo,

Barranquilla.

Awaiting motives, I have delayed this correspondence, since everything that I had to say to you about my departure from there was rather insignificant.

Now, after fifteen days of awful stay in this, “my devil’s island,” I have received orders to depart for Santo Domingo, the only likely asylum left in my infinite peregrination.

The Vice Consul, Mr. Penso, has done on my behalf everything that his reach has made possible. He procured me passage to Venezuela; but the consul of that republic denied to grant me a passport, at which point the island administration intervened, took matters into their own hands, examined my situation to the point of offense, for threats to bourgeois order, and ordered me to depart for the only country of refuge remaining to me.

So it is that in a very short time I have been distanced some hundreds of miles further from that land all the more beloved the more ungrateful it is. My heart sown there, it will have nothing to do but stretch itself over a space as large as the distance that separates me from Colombia.

And there in the beautiful Quisqueya, as in all places where I have placed my sole, my speech will contain an incandescent sentence against the tyrants and the world one more beach to receive this wave that does not die because it does not find any sand to receive it in its agony.

I go to Santo Domingo as I have gone everywhere: without any resources but the satchel of my ideas and without any weapons but the traveler’s staff.

And like the biblical Moses, there also I will strike the rock of the old tyrants and with the bitter water of disillusionment I will let flow my path toward the Calvary that will some day be Tabor.

Because nights are not endless. Suffering is perhaps more inconstant than pleasure, because we can artificialize the latter but not the former. On the other hand, I am neither happier nor more unfortunate than any other. I love life and I feel it. The day it ceases to be true to me, I will destroy it.

People who complain disgust me. To complain is to declare yourself weak. Here, on a table of white marble, intoxicated on the aphrodisiac aroma of red flowers, in a room of warm tropical love, I feel as much the king of myself as deep within a dirty dungeon starving and tortured. Because greatness is not in things, but in the individual.

I do not aspire to the presidency of the republic but I defy anyone who, in the name of that title wishes to dominate me. That is why I have fought and will fight as long as I live in my unshakeable faith in the dignity of existence; I make no compromise with petty weaknesses. That is why I have hated that party of filibusterers of power that are sometimes called Ruribe, sometimes Fernández; they are nothing but slaves of passions as vile as the enjoyment of oppressing others.

If I were to aspire to any party in Colombia, that party would be that of the men and women psychiarchists. The greatness of feeling: here I have my only possible aristocracy.

This is not to say that I do not get mixed up in the public affairs of the country. I have been wounded and I defend myself. My exile is a fight without treaty or rest. This is my attitude. I am the revolution.

And under this title I elaborate a kind of political-sociological-philosophical program, which, adapting to the country and the ethnic spirit, the conjurers of contemporary thought will allow our youth a daring step from their present morbid conservative state to a phase of the most advanced evolution without waiting on the tiring mediations of the parties that do things halfway.

Soon I will send you a descriptive correspondence about this, my latest journey; for now it is not possible for me to extend myself to matters foreign to the strictly political sense of this petite lettre.

I hope that you send me your newspaper to Santo Domingo; and I also ask of you all the generous journalists of there and of the country in general. And for my part, I will send you very soon my Antichrist, which, with the consent of the authorities, without their consent and in spite of their consent, has to be and will be something more than a ray from Damascus in the path of the defeats en route to San Isidro.

I am the Señor Director’s most affectionate and compatriotic servant,

Biófilo Panclasta

Curacao, May 8, 1910.

Crimes Against Thinking

Señor Bejamín Palacio Uribe. Bogotá.

I write you from a jungle. From the banks of a river. Under a torrential sky. I have a lot to say. A lot... But my soul is not condensing ideas. My hand is stiff. Great sufferings are untranslatable.

In spite of this, I do not want to miss this first opportunity to let the world know of the nefarious work of which I am victim.

What I want to trace in these lines is not a complaint. Neither is it a protest. I do not believe I am weak, nor do I believe my enemies are conscious.

But the act whose consequences I suffer, it is nothing but the work of irrational beings. How to understand it otherwise?

I returned to Colombia, with the guarantee of the promises that the new government had made of opening the doors to all expatriates. I returned with my satchel of ideas and my traveler’s staff to knock on the doors of the national conscience, in search of a highest feeling, of a supreme idea of homeland salvation. Because in spite of my anarchic ideas, I too have a homeland, or better yet, a collective I, and by my very egoism I must defend myself, defending it.

Soul pregnant with hopes and mind pregnant with energies, I arrived in Colombia like a dethroned Lucifer, hopeful and fiery. On the 16th of last November the steamer that brought me from abroad put in at Cartagena. I arrived satisfied and proud.

But how great was my disillusion when a thug barked at me the order to not come “to land”!

“Why?”

To this question, governor De la Vega has answered me it was because Reyes had me exiled from the country before.

“But did he not do so before a decree allowing political exiles permission to return to Colombia?”

“Yes, but not for you, because your ideas are a crime!”

Then, as a protest against destiny itself, that very destiny which would obligate me to be born in a country where thinking is a crime, I wanted to throw myself into the sea in order to force the governor to be made responsible for an act that he carried out with no conscience.

And in fact I managed to force him into the inquisitorial spectacle of taking me from the ship in a file of executioners, locking me up in a miserable police space.

I was imprisoned but I was victorious. I was in Colombia.

Imprisoned: great. The abuse was in the open. Resplendent injustice.

What would they do with me?

Very soon Señor De la Vega’s lack of conscience found a way to resolve my situation, which was aggravating his own. In agreement with the German consul and the Hamburg-America Line Company, the subsequent day I embarked again on board the Sardina and he sent me to Colón, communicating to the police of that port beforehand so that I would be apprehended and thus imprisoned there for the crime of being a patriot; I could not return to Colombia to commit the crime of aspiring to be free.

Colombia delivered me in shackles to Panama. The mother placed me under the traitorous and cowardly executioner’s ax.

Is this believable?

No! This is why, in qualifying it, I qualify it as an unconscionable act.

This is why I do not protest, why I do not argue anything. But on the other hand the capitol has to stop being an insane asylum. Reason! The nation is lost for lack of logic.

What happened to me when I arrived in Colón is what you would suppose. Violently seized from the steamer, I was taken to the prison, tortured, vilified. I accused the executive Obaldía to the Supreme Court. Then I was transferred to the capitol. And there envaulted. Until one day, December 8, I was taken and thrown in a rotting boat without provisions, which took me to Juradó and abandoned me there. So Panama avoided the affront of its crime. So they wanted to kill me by drowning far away, since they lacked the courage to finish me off at close range.

And if I have saved my life, it is a moral biological phenomenon. Five days I went without eating. Twenty in the jungles. Horrifically. Today I leave. I leave for the Atrato River.

My dangers continue. I do not even have the reward of sex, but I will keep going. I will keep going there... there... and for then, let the world wait: the effort of the citizen who believes he wants to be governed by men...

Biófilo Panclasta

Red Seed

B. Rosales de la Rosa,

Barranquilla.

To communicate is to grow. Love is nothing but the unconscious communication of life. And is there anything more felt than love?

What is good, Nietzsche said, is the feeling that power grows when a resistance is defeated.

To be great is to be everything. Man can be everything. To unite is to become gigantic. To communicate is to fuse together.

To speak in order to express thought is to enhance thought. To express feeling, now by means of words, now by means of the arts, in music, is to broaden the soul toward the limits that expand the capacity of our own psychic potency.

Thought is infinite, but like the force of attraction between bodies, it needs a repulsive mass which, balancing tendencies, forms the neutral point, which requires another thought’s opposition in order to be a force. An idea is but the result of two absolute extremes colliding. The spark of two clouds as they meet.

I do not know if the thinker or the artist need their listeners more than the listeners need them.

Life is a kind of continual enlargement. That cruel struggle that Darwin speaks to us of is the proof. Everyone struggles to become greater. Thus individualism is nothing but the proof of socialism, as egoism is nothing other than that of altruism.

Egoism is determined by the hunger necessity, and breadism by the love necessity. Why does man feed himself? So as to give life to other beings.

Therefore the individualist anarchist philosophy disgusts me as much as the socialist-conservative one. Both lean to absolute extremes. And man is not only sociable nor only individualistic. Man is the most sociable animal and at the same time the most individualistic. And that is why I do not call myself either an “anarchist” like Mackay nor a communist like Grave. I am historically a radical socialist.

As this letter is nothing but the preamble of a series of epistles I will address to you on social-political matters, I will extend myself no further today. For the next occasion, hope that the circumstances will allow me to send them. And now au revoir.

Regarding the consequences of my expulsion, I only address to you that I will shortly be expelled from here to Santo Domingo; send me your periodical and what you can to there. For my part, I will send you my Antichrist.

Your compatriot,

Biófilo Panclasta

Interview with Biófilo Panclasta in El Republicano

Biófilo Panclasta, the Colombian anarchist, is in our city. He arrived five days ago. He is currently under arrest in a detention center. He got in a fight with a Philistine and the authorities took a side in the matter. […]

Panclasta is about thirty years old… He is tall, pale, with a thin beard. Lively eyes. He speaks with a good degree of fluidity. His ideas are not well organized. On his forehead, somewhat darkened and disordered in tragic locks, the mane of thoughtful dreamers.

Hello, Mr. Panclasta.

Biófilo Panclasta.

I am here to visit you. I am a journalist with the Cruzada Radical Socialista from La Calera, and I want to exchange ideas with you.

Journalists are my allies in wandering. I have always counted on them for all my propaganda. They are my allies.

…?

I come from all parts and none. I can only tell you I am from the world.

…?

All of Europe, except China and all of the Americas.

…?

I was in The Hague, at the time of the Conference. There I saw Messrs. Holguín, Vargas, and Pérez Triana. They provided me with economic aid.

…?

With Malato I don’t get along very well. I took back my friendship on the day he said a certain thing about me: “Biófilo Panclasta is not an anarchist. He is a ferocious personalist who, disobeying everything, wants to dominate everyone.”

…?

I am not a terrorist in the explosive sense of the word. I was a terrorist when I had the passion and fire of an initiate. But evolutionism has taught me that an isolated crime establishes nothing, and that propaganda only works with the pen and the word.

…?

I am not a Marxist. Karl Marx proceeds from the point of view of historical fatalism, based in the natural evolution of Spencer and the organic evolution of Darwin. Marx places complete faith in those theories, which still remain unproven. And I think that to transform society you have to make a revolution.

…?

Ferrer’s death was a juridical assassination, because he founded Schools, just as I have been called terrorist because I am a force in action against despotism in all its forms, including the monastic one. Nietzsche, Spencer, Unamuno, Max Nordau, Tolstoy, Gorki and all modern thinkers are more or less anarchists without anyone daring to call them terrorists.

…?

I think that in this land the anarchists are Guillermo Valencia, Vargas Vila, and myself. Maybe General Jorge Martínez L. in some way.

But Valencia is clerical.

On the outside; on the inside it is anarchist.

Do you know Arias Correa? He is a ferocious anarchist. He and Palacio Uribe hold classes in the Modern School of Ferrer, the gymnastics teacher professor.

I know those two “brothers” and I know how high they have flown the flag of my ideas. Arias Correa has tried to discredit me, but I love him. I am like sandalwood: I perfume the ax that strikes me.

Do you know Rodríguez Triana, another “brother”?

I know him from his last two letters to El Pacífico. Those letters have many points of view with which I am in agreement.

Tomorrow I will bring another disciple of your School. He is one of the most fortunate ones.

Who?

Dr. Laureano Gómez, who edits a libertarian [ácrata] newspaper in this city, called La Unidad.

It will be a great pleasure to press the hand of that “brother.”

And another moderate anarchist will come to visit you as well, from the School of Mateo Morral.

Which one?

The editor of La Sociedad, a newspaper subsidized by Briand.

Ah! Briand! His work is great. It is a product of evolutionism. Briand was a communist. Today he is an individualist. And his thought is a peaceful reconciliation of communism and individualism.

They say here that you have the intention of blowing up Dr. Antonio José Uribe, head of the Cruzada Concentrista, with a bomb. That would be a distortion?

I do not think Dr. Uribe needs a bomb. We will easily convince Dr. Uribe to join our ranks. We need him for propaganda in the lecture halls.

…?

I think that Colombia is an impossible country, but federation and governmental civilization will get a reaction in the life of the Republic.

…?

I have been persecuted for my ideas; I have been exiled by all governments. I have suffered infinite pains and miseries for upholding this idea that I bear in my brain. But I will not lose heart until I see its triumph on high. My motto is: equality.

…?

I would prefer not to be seen in this suit.

But it seems fine to me. I don’t think of Gorki, Grave, or Tolstoy dressed in a tailcoat. They travel in the book and newspaper in shirtwaist.

It’s all right.

…?

I was immensely nostalgic. I wanted to return to Colombia. And I have felt so well in body and mind that I have even drank chicha, because chicha is a symbol of Colombia.

!!!

…?

In Río de Janeiro I was a close friends of Elisio de Carvalho, libertarian writer and propagandist of my ideas.

…?

Yes, sir. I was part of the strikes in Buenos Aires, but I withdrew from them due to disagreements with one of the organizers.

…?

Theoretically I am still a libertarian, but as I believe that politics is the art of applying, in each era, the part of the ideal that is most adequate to circumstances, my action today in Colombia will be the same as that of Briand in France and Lerroux in Spain.

…!

Why?

Because they will not allow it here.

I think we have some freedom. And in that belief I will found El Radical Socialista.

At the press of the Cruzada Católica they will print it for free.

It is five o’clock. The photographer has taken a picture of Biófilo, and I have ended the interview. However, Biófilo continues to speak.

What you feel most when you are imprisoned is that you have lost even the right to commit a crime.

Now, don’t frown, dear neighbors of the parish. Biófilo is totally harmless. […] I respect and admire him. Simply because in Biófilo Panclasta there is a dream. And a man who has not been able to make life equal to a dream deserves respect. Biófilo is not a terrorist. Not even an anarchist. He is simply a dreamer. He caresses his idea as he caresses a woman…

Interview with Biófilo Panclasta in El Gráfico

[Introduction indicates that it was the reporter who did the above interview with El Republicano, the day before, who alerted this reporter to BP’s presence in Bogotá]

The jail: the door is opened for us and we see Biófilo speaking out in the open, surrounded by various employees, some curious listeners and policemen, and a priest. Before greeting the terrible anarchist I make a phone call to the offices of El Gráfico:

“Send a photographer. Panclasta is making propaganda in jail.”

When the photographer arrives a picture is taken to go with the article.

Meanwhile, Panclasta, in a many-colored oration, expounds his theories. He mentions episodes of his life story, proposes examples, recalls names, and demolishes systems.

A policeman whispers in my ear:

“Smart guy, right? If this man were dressed up he could attain some notability here.”

Speaking of notability, I asked him for his opinion on many personalities of our time, naming them one by one. Panclasta smiles, asks me to repeat the names and tells me that he has no news of those famous nobodies.

Do you think, Mr. Biófilo, sir, that the State is the enemy of the individual?

Yes. A State such as the one I find myself in is the worst enemy one can have.

And so are you planning to throw one or more bombs here?

I have already said that I am a peaceful citizen. If I had gunpowder, I wouldn’t waste it on some turkeys; I would make firecrackers to sell. If I do hope to transform humanity, it is with my word: my word of honor.

But aren’t you an apostle of destruction? Don’t you want to disturb the world?

No sir! What for? The world will end on its own, as a seer has predicted, on October 25, 1916. That will be a memorable date for the coming generations!

And you are not a Molotov thrower, either?

No sir. I light myself up with something else.

A nihilist?

Not that either. Nihilism gives me a headache.

A terrorist?

Terrorism terrorizes me.

So what do you do?

I spread my doctrine, I preach equality, and I patiently suffer the persecutions of justice.

You are a great man.

That is what Sergi, Turatti, Marx, and a multitude of colleagues have said. And when the river sounds…

The hour of six rang out and the authorities of the jail declared that our visit was over. We said goodbye to Panclasta and left the jail behind, not without a glimmer of sympathy for this sui generis anarchist…

Red Dawn

Spain rests upon the crater of a great social volcano.

Twenty thousand refugees threaten to cross the borders and the workers of Barcelona prepare to carry out a great strike that, like the previous ones, will be bloody and revolutionary.

And the government persists in the obstinacy of resisting the formidable thrust of this great wave that grows with the popular fury that is always the bloody reverse of all the tyrannies.

The people store up hatred in their soul; thinkers, ideas of redemption in their minds; artists, feelings of love in their imaginations; the people suffer, suffer in silence like the docility of the sea in fair weather: any old basket can command it, but one day, it whips up, it overflows, and nothing and no one can resist its pounding.

The social revolution is a great cry of suffering. It is the complaint of a hundred centuries of ignominy. It is the furtively loosed breath of the virgin imprisoned in the nets of bourgeois inequity, it is the cry of the child who feels hunger, it is the act of the worker without bread, it is the blood of the just who ask heaven for vengeance, it is, ultimately, the mighty roar of humanity that awakens like a lion after slumber to the persistent lash of the whip of death!

The revolution is a redemptive and tragic labor; revolutionaries are almost always unconscious avengers; they split from each other, they oppose each other, they destroy each other, but the revolution is life, the revolution is a people’s sublime defense when, above all laws both human and natural, their sacred rights of life and liberty are violated.

O! revolution, like light you burn, but like light you also purify and illuminate.

Biófilo Panclasta

San Gil Prison, June 28, 1927

Psychological Sketches of Criollo Revolutionaries

Jacinto Albarracín C.

A red Don Quixote in search of adventures, loves and sorrows.

The revolution is for him the Dulcinea of a crimson paradise.

Erudite, classicist, and dogmatic, he is severe in doctrine and inconstant in society. Protective of his name as revolutionary, with the logs of his academic framework he lights the pyre where he sacrifices himself.

Writer of the clearest style, orator of the pulpit, flattering and gallant, astute and verbose, he comprises the complex kind of revolutionary of the plains.

Ramón Bernal Azula

It is very rare for lawyers, or men of law, who are always the negotiation of nature, to interpret it as the biological foundation of the social sciences.

But, in Bernal Azula, as in González Sabogal, Jacinto Albarracín and Clodomiro Ramírez, the spirit of the law is the law of the spirit.

They interpret judicial law as a socialization of natural law.

They are an ideological mixture of Montesquieu and Rousseau.

Ramón Bernal Azula is an ardent orator full of noble enthusiasm, fine Damascene dialectics, and sincere righteous passion.

As a writer he is a block of multiple polychrome tonalities, he is almost a sophist, ethics are his aesthetic.

Bernal Azula, as an orator, is impossible to follow.

Pablo E. Mancera

He is a Prometheus of the ideal. He was one of the first proletarian soldiers who began the workerist movement in 1904. He is a long-suffering and avid social organizer, more of a unionist than an idealist, despite his modest living and writing; he has the qualities of a rebel orator and writer.

His work is very dense and arduous.

For Mancera, to free, to unionize, is to live.

Mancera is the revolutionary Diogenes.

Juana J. Guzmán

Forerunner, like her namesake the Baptist, of social Christianity (as some would call the second human revolution), this noble and intelligent comrade has been the soul of the libertarian revolt in Montería.

Policarpa of the heart, with greater mind and greater conscience than she, she sacrifices everything for her ideal, her beloved; which, like Jesus for Saint Teresa, burns her in flames of her love for the dispossessed.

Escolástico Alvarez

The Maceo of Colombian freedom, one could say of Alvarez what they say of the Cuban hero: he was born, like the diamond from carbon, to give light and courage to life.

“Kolako” as the “kolakas”, birds of love and misery, call him, he is the most popular of the revolutionaries of the Magdalena River: doctor, pharmacist, journalist, he lives for nothing but the ideal of social redemption and human justice.

In association with his brother, he hoisted the red flag in Antioquia with practices of immense kindness, rebellion and sacrifice. Wounded there, “Kolako” founded the “Red Start” that has caused so much trouble for the timid soul of the colorless Arciniégas.

Abel de Portillo

A century of passion made flesh. A heart transformed into a spark that burns and illuminates. A crude fighter, like a sower of lightning. Pure as rock crystal. Generous and sincere, like the sandalwood that perfumes even the ax that strikes it.

He is not a journalist, sage, or artist. He is a rebel. He is something more, he is a worker who, as he amasses his daily bread with his calloused hands, likewise forges libertarian tempests in his volcanic mind.

Carlos F. León

Láutaro gave him his character and Juárez his heroic valor; a native like them, he has the aboriginals’ indomitable purity.

The synthesis of a race oppressed and defeated but not degraded.

León is stone faced; but like all mountains he has the guts of a volcano. Slow to speak, sincere and methodical. Valiant and loyal.

For León as for his blood relative Juárez, peace means the respect for the rights of others.

Fidedigno Cuellar and Enriqueta de Cuéllar

“And like two waves of changeable mother-of-pearl that grow closer and closer to the shore, our united souls go ever on along the path of life.” This stupendous verse by Gutiérrez González seems written to express the intimate life of Enriqueta and Fidedigno Cuéllar.

Two minds in one bicephalous soul of the ideal; two wings of one eagle lost in the immensity of the ocean; two fighters, united in a single spasm of battle, of love, and of agony.

Ismael Gómez Alvarez

He is Bakunin’s ideal type of revolutionary.

Like a shipwrecked soul in the red ocean who sees the saving beach in the far distance, he has abandoned everything to swim, to struggle, in the tempestuous revolutionary sea.

Composure of Maceo, soul of Asis, if his satchel lacks bread his veins are not wanting for blood and from it he nourishes his heroic living-fighting.

He is the communist Ricaurte.

Neftali Arce

The Robespierre of the social revolution.

Meticulously dressed, elegantly spoken, temperate in vice; well-groomed and refined.

He has an artistic love of arson and, like Nero, would be capable of burning the world just for the pleasure of getting carried away in destruction.

Well-loved and preferred but not a selector, he has the egoism of being first in the ideal, first in the struggle and the first to sacrifice himself.

Servio Tulio Sanchez

Bagger of ideals. The ideal kind of “Manquillo de los Merinales,” with a package always carried under his arm, the treasure of a studious Bohemian. Orator of the barricade, feather of the condor, ungainly and agile, wordy and passionate.

For Servio, to struggle is to enjoy. He travels through the world with the delight of a river that goes calling through the flowery and the arid riverbanks the plaintive shouts of his living as he flows. Obstacles purify his soul; in his tempestuous deeps he carries flowers, shit, pearls and mud.

Juan de Dios Romero

A secular John of God; like him, he only lays down his soldier’s duties to bring pieces of his scant bread to his brothers the disinherited.

An untiring fighter, he will even commit crime to keep living his life. Courageous and hostile, he steps back only out of pity.

A writer in the style of a waterfall. His language lacks book learning; but it has delights of thunder, cloudscapes of lightning.

Juan de Dios is a true Romero, always sad and always green. He hates seriousness, and in his inheritances he gets the lion’s share.

General Saavedra and Daughter

He is not a military man; he is a soldier of freedom. He carried the blade of the hero on the battlefields and now, on the field of the ideal, he fights with the boldness of youth; like the father of Atanacio Girardot, he has passed the social battles to his intelligent and Amazonian daughter who as a revolutionary is a beautiful red reality.

Among that group of rebels from Moniquirá, all worthy of glorious mention, we choose these two names, because the narrow field prevents us from speaking of all.

Lizandro Candia Q.

An Indian carving of red gold. A snow-capped and embattled summit, he weighs the sky with his ideals and treads emeralds underfoot in his ardent and noble dreamer’s path. Neither a writer nor a poet, neither learned nor lettered; not even a worker; he is a lily sick with love and rebellion; respectful and generous, his only ambition is others’ happiness.

In the blue sky of his revolutionary dreams, he waits, provoking hope for hope.

Manuel Camargo

Flower of snow, ponderous and rotund; absurd and loquacious. Paradoxical, ironic, an elegant sophist. Fervent in speech, ardent in thought, sensitive and voluptuous.

Well-loved and preferred.

Inconstant and stubborn.

Very optimistic and very inconsiderate, he is nevertheless amiable because he loves and hates with the passion of a schoolboy.

Erudite and sensible, he has still not formed his writing style.

But he is a hope: a beautiful, red hope.

Julia Ruiz

Love for her is admiration set on fire and sublimated piety.

“I stopped being a sister of charity,” she says, “because I couldn’t do charity as one.”

And by charity she understands love. “I love because I have struggled and have suffered much.”

“I loved the liberals as persecuted, but as persecutors they don’t even deserve my heart’s enthusiasm nor the effort of my pen.”

Julia Ruiz is a Joan of Arc, with a pen for a dagger, with her longings for freedom and justice as a religion and with the revolution as the sublime ideal of her heart.

Baldomero Sanín Cano

The most philosophical of the revolutionaries — and the least revolutionary of the philosophers.

Erudite and universal. Stylish and methodical. A forward-thinking evolutionist of the Stuart Mill school, he got to the socialist vanguard before anyone.

Disdainful and anti-academic, he does not like contact with workers, nor do they make him golden armchairs.

He will be the José Ingenieros of the revolution.

María Cano

Butterfly of libertarian love who burns her wings in the bonfire of human travesty, dazzled by the splendor of burning souls.

A whimsical flower full of perfumes that intoxicate the passengers on the road of liberty.

A bird who does not fear the voluptuous cruelty of the furtive hunter, “Red Star”, in a clear sky of the prisoners of the ideal.

Sensitive soul.

Heart of Magdalene.

Flame, light, angel, bird, flower, nothing more.

Red...

Red, indeed.

Very red!

Esteban Rodríguez Triana

“Colombia and I are like this.” Complex soul, apocalyptic character. Nostalgic bird. A peacock feather, not by way of vanity but for the many brilliant colors.

Disinterested and sincere.

Bohemian and ascetic,

A skeptical ascetic,

An unbelieving artist.

Student of law, writer, journalist. He has only wanted to be one thing: Esteban Rodríguez Triana.

Hail to you, proto-martyr, you carry in your mind the thinker’s fire!

Aníbal Badel

Aníbal is a revolutionary because he is a rebel.

Perhaps he is lacking in ideologies. He is not an author or a scientist. He cannot judge feelings, but he is an impressionist.

He loves emotion.

Love moves him.

And love makes heroes by fashion or by tragedy.

He would like to be, would be, a butterfly, an idea seduces him just like a flower, but he is inconstant.

But love can do anything, since love is the affinity of souls, the attraction of molecules, gravity in space, heaviness in bodies.

Badel is not Badel.

Tomas Uribe Márquez

He has the knack for proselytism of Uribe, the statesman’s sense of President Márquez and the doubt of his namesake and apostle.

He is the Desmoulins of the revolution.

Neither crazy enthusiasm nor fits of hysteria.

Rhythmic as a funereal metronome.

Discrete when he works.

Prudent if he speaks.

Incendiary as a writer.

Colorful, sharp, clean style, modesty of learning, logical and penetrating.

Like the turtle, he goes slowly, but his shell is a shield that gives off sparks.

Pacho and Pablo Cote

The Quintero brothers of Colombian journalism.

Eclectic, sensible, practical.

Combative and discrete.

Agile and astute.

Little loud vanity, great sense of means; harmonic souls, strong arms, crystalline forces of will.

Laborers of thought and of work, modern laborers, they synthesize the soul of this virile and sentimental people in a single moment for their “not so small” homeland.

Luis A. Rozo

A steel cord modulating songs of love and freedom.

Always like so: like strong steel, like love, amiable as prescribed freedom.

Oceanic of heart and beloved of will; poor in attitude towards society.

He loves the ideal like a shield; with it he shields his noble I and his self.

Neither enchantments nor flattery. Idleness, prudence, character.

Like the great mountains: bowels of fire, cold face; revolutionary majesty.

Luis A. Rozo is the thermometer of the revolution.

José Maria Olozaga

A vision of Richelieu. Organizer and tactician. Quixotic in bearing. Martial in instinct. Combative and convincing. Loquacious and eloquent. Generous and methodical. Cynical and frank. A torrential writer. A hurried orator. A substantial thinker.

Basque in race, he is Basque in character, Spanish of heart, tropical in imagination.

Like so many other revolutionaries, he comes from the bureaucratic bourgeois camp and, like Kropotkin the prince, Malatesta the count, Reclus the wealthy, he brought only his noble conviction to the red camp, where while if the living is not lucrative, the fighting is glorious indeed.

Ignacio Torres Giraldo

The most Attic of the criollo stylists.

Speech of lightning, logic of steel, language of a fountain embedded with sands of gold.

Free of frenzies and spasms.

Faith of a sage, action of a soldier.

Meticulous and popular.

Select and selective.

Rough faced, strong souled.

Straight willed.

He loves the ideal as a woman, as everyone loves it; love is struggle.

The revolution is a woman.

Jorge Uribe Márquez

Golden honeybee.

A tireless worker in the human colony.

He does not know of the flowers’ honey, he only harvests love in fraternal souls.

Erudite, student of law and journalist, he, like Bakunin, only accepts a weapon as knowledge and knowledge as a weapon.

Affable and generous; like all fighters he is hard and devout; he loves and despises; son of the Andes; he lives with the condor in the heights and, like the condor, if he finds it impossible to win he will not find it impossible to die.

Julio Buritica G.

He seems of wax, and is of steel. Affable and courteous as a friend; he is intense and irascible as a revolutionary. Adaptable spirit, Christian will; the ideological evolution of his I was rapid and, like a caterpillar, upon leaving his dark conservative robes, the red butterfly shone with splendor its wings in the proletarian camp. He is a sower of ideals in every cultural field. Teacher, journalist and orator, he has sacrificed everything for the noble vanity of being a martyr.

Pacho Valencia

He is a red dawn kissing the ruins of a medieval city.

He is the songbird deflowering the silence of a saddened field.

Pacho Valencia is a sick man, of dismal silences.

An orator, unlike his brother Guillermo, like the Quetzal, on seeing himself enslaved he covers his singing head with his white wings and dies.

Pacho Valencia is a revolutionary glory.

Jose Gonzalo Sánchez

Like Sandino, he is the last rebel of the vanquished race, but like Samson he dies while killing his oppressors. Huila has not heard a more terrifying voice. The Andes have not been climbed by a more daring revolutionary.

He defends humanity as a socialist, but he suffers of the nostalgia of the Chibcha Jeremiahs under the melancholy willows of an age of infamy. He is his race. He is 20 centuries of Colombia.

Juan Bautista Villafañe

Like José Gonzalo Sánchez and like the Indian Quintín Lame, these three are the august trinity of the aboriginal race who, with Láutaro and Manco Capac, made the inquisitorial and Gothic Spain tremble.

His work in the Sierra Nevada is unparalleled among human efforts for the emancipation of the oppressed.

Like the Eskimos, the snow of the Sierra is his refuge and there, like the hero of Nicaragua, he will resist the hordes of traitors who, in the name of religion, liberalism and the homeland, barter with the honor of the race and sell to the insolent yanki the mother of us all: Colombia!

Juan de Dios Gutiérrez Iregui

In all countries and times the shoemaker has always been a natural rebel. Since Samuel, the errant Jew, history indicates this skeptic as an unbeliever in the prophecies of Jesus...

And Simón “the shoemaker,” presumed murdered by the pigeon of the tyrant Louis XVII the Dauphin, preferred his mending of old shoes to the honors of the victorious bourgeoisie.

Gutiérrez is the old indefatigable fighter. Like Malatesta, his life is a generous wine that becomes stronger the more it ages.

Alberto Pulido

Wanderer of restless sole; dreamer of condor flights, fever of wings, desert eagle’s wings.

From the first flashes of the social dawn, his rooster’s voice has tirelessly called to the red sun.

Crazy like Jesus, Galileo, and Columbus, he has never cared about poverty, prison, and death.

Pulido is an indefatigable fighter; popular orator, polytechnic worker, parish poet; generous and brave. Over his gray haired years floats the loving, adventurous, flirty soul of a twenty-year-old.

Julio Campo Vásquez

He is the Red Sucre, Knight of Promethean combats; he works in the glorious camp of an ideal that every rebel apostle has dreamt of. Courtly writer of the d’Annunzio school, his pen is the rock of Moses from which marvelous water springs, convincing the doubtful. Demosthenian orator; his torrent of ideas become sparks, carries the thirsty souls, the neurosis of social fire. Campo Vásquez is a bird who, with his white wings, climbs to a very high, very red peak.

Jorge Madero

The “chic” type of aristocratic revolutionary. Effusive, vehement; affectionate as a cat; speedy as a hare; reads little, knows less, talks a lot. With his bourgeois last name, he is malleable as a “madero” , and enthusiastic as a peasant on a Sunday.

His revolutionary ideal is just an Osiris serenade at the foot of a window in an abandoned castle.

He is a romantic revolutionary; he is a child playing with fire.

Armando Solano

A mixture of Lamartine and Voltaire. Sentimental and mystical; ironic and rancorous. Attic writer, Apollonian stylist; chronicler of minute details. He seems modest, and he is proud. There is much syncretism in his Flaubertian quill.

Like his fellow countryman Sotero, who is a “sote”, if we divide Solano’s name in half we would be left with the first particle, “sol” ... the psychic antithesis of his sublime “I”.

Building the revolution à la Dumas, it is, for him, a hothouse daisy. His socialism is a “maitresse de Renard.”

Felipe Lleras Camargo

The weak and jaundiced man who poured out the tormentous soul of Robespierre is like a mental model of this criollo revolutionary who writes with a hand that is a great tree branch made of sparks.

Lleras Camargo is a fugitive of this anticlerical dungeon called Colombia; a Jeremiah-like fugitive who places in the accursed graves that separate us from civilization, all of the sadness of the defeated and all of the indignation of the rebel.

“Ruy Blas” is a red oasis in the desert of the nation, and Felipe Llerars Camargo is the “unchanging” sower.

Abel Botero

Puritan as a Quaker; gladiator with a lovely and rare fighting style; idealistic revolutionary; ethical idealist. Among those of that heroic phalanx of the “new” he is like a ruby encrusted in a marble frame.

His sociological concepts are quite doctrinaire and thus strange in these arrogant but uneducated herds.

He will make the red-bohemian life practical in the criollo applications of the revolutionary moment.

Gabriel Chávez C.

The moaning murmur of the waves of the Magdalena has vibrated in the soul of this old idealist like the desolate tears of an abandoned mother. In Chávez, all is heart; he even loves the snake that bites him; in his soul he bears all the essences of the primitive jungle and the deep wishes of a barricade. He is not well-read, and he only reads the newspapers that speak to him of love and rebellion. He is a tropical Tolstoy; coarse and combative, in sum he is a red sentry at a mountaintop of fantasies.

Efraim de la Cruz

Master of bohemia, fantastical and acute; simian and talkative; wounding and an avenger. Impenitent invert, voracious and quavering; neither whistles, nor drums, nor rivers, nor “Rubicons” will put out the fire of his happy living.

He writes the way schoolgirls play at love. Vacant and errant, he neither thinks about what he writes nor says what he thinks.

After all the years made him “cartomantic” , as if he could foresee García’s future. “But if it is all in vain and the soul does not forget you, what do you want me to do, piece of my life, what do you want me to do, with this ‘Rubicon’?”

Jaime Barrera Parra

If something strongly refutes the paradoxical thesis of Laureano Gómez it is the anthropogeographic, criollo, tropical figure of Barrera Parra.

Never has an ethnic type been modeled by the physical environment more ethnically; that is, Barrera is a legitimate plant of the tropical flora.

And yet, like Juárez, Juan Montalvo, and Maceo, Jaime has a superhuman soul. “Idealism,” as Barrera Parra says in Universidad, “must be as compatible with action as, within a human organism, cerebral function is compatible with locomotion.”

Action and thought. Revolutionary unity. This renewal, which would appear to be the work of “El Libertador”, is the work of the moment that Jaime Barrera Parra so practically announces.

Leonilde Riaño

These “red flowers of work” like barbasco flowers, are ever more beautiful the more poisonous they are.

We had already denominated María Cano the “Red Star” that so disturbs the easily frightened spirits of the “Rengifian” colonels and generals.

What’s more, as a flower poisons more than a star, let us agree that Leonilde will continue to be called that; for she is a flower as a woman, and bile and poison as a revolutionary.

The Mystery of El Salto made her amazon soul mysterious — she writes like a comet’s tail soaking in the red sea of the ideal.

A people has not died when it has women like Leonilde Riaño, revolutionary Flower of the Tequendama.

J... Nieto

Ardor of the twenty-year-old; an arm that feels the nostalgias of warlike struggle; audacious and combative; obliging and generous.

Vehement and sincere; not too learned, quite new in his knowledge; neat and tenacious; he is, as Luis Cano said, a “Lenin-ian Biófilo”; but his communism is only a fighter’s discipline: his ideal is anarchic.

Me!

Biófilo, in Greek means lover of life, Panclasta, enemy of all. This contradiction explains me ego sum quim sum!

I Do Not Rectify, I Ratify

Statement to Judge Lombana

When, in the presence of the public calamities that afflict the unfortunate Colombian people; when, in the presence of the Catholic and miserable state to which Colombia has arrived, a group of thinkers of all parties, but a group of generous, rebellious and sincere thinkers, threw to the peasants, workers and poor students a manifesto of revolutionary solidarity, action and selection, no one thought or could have thought that this emergence of thought would be considered a crime, since, despite all the tyranny in Colombia, the simple expression of ideas had still never been considered a nefarious crime.

The unfortunately celebrated Judge Lombana has initiated a criminal process against the persons who signed the Manifesto of the National Center of Revolutionary Unity and Action to the workers, peasants and poor students of Colombia.

We do not know what judicial pretext Judge Lombana has made use of to initiate such inequity, but in any case we will not be the ones who rectify our statements out of childish fear or personal benefit; quite to the contrary, still standing after this blow to our insistence, with pride we ratify and widen that which we proclaim in broad daylight, yesterday, today and forever, as the beautiful, intangible and glorious ideal of our life: the revolutionary ideal.

The Manifesto calls for the union of all beings who hunger for freedom, fraternity, and justice, because in this dark hour, when all the tyrannies, phantasms and miseries hang over the defenseless Colombian people; in this cruel hour when Colombia writhes in agony between thieves and traitors, when life has been made unbearable, when neither government, congress nor society do anything but sacrifice the suffering and defenseless people, when the country kneels before the filibustering yanquis, when we lack protective laws, defenses, bread, roof, life, then defense is a sacred right and this defense can only be made by the very people who suffer, agonize, pass away.

Therefore we call for the union of all who suffer, all who think, all men of good and noble will.

Is it a crime to associate for the defense of the right to life?

And the center also says it is of action, because the most heroic thoughts are worth nothing if they are not transformed into deeds.

Action is labor, activity, deeds. But it takes all the bad faith of the reigning iniquity to confuse revolutionary action with war, riots, killings, attacks.

“The greatest human revolution,” said the religious author Donoso Cortés, “has been the change in hearts called the Christian Revolution.”

And “History of the Revolution” is what the historian Restrepo calls the great movement of American emancipation. Words, like ideas, have the significance given them by the mind that conceives them. For Judge Lombana, the word revolution is diabolical, criminal, but the good name of the Colombian people cannot be made prisoner of imbecility and infamy by the hyper-conservative criteria of a medieval judge.

No center, club, community is organized but to function within the ideas, purposes and circumstances that determine it. Disorganized as the different revolutionary seeds are, without orientation, direction or prosecution, as the great proletarian peasant masses are discovering, it is necessary for the country’s rebels to organize, become compact, and educate themselves so as to fight united against the triple monster of yanki, Catholic and bourgeois tyranny that oppresses and annihilates the suffering and defenseless Colombian people.

The Constitution, which we only cite as the dogma of our adversary, guarantees the right of association.

It is a crime to associate for one’s defense against all the enemies that stalk and kill?

And finally, the Manifesto of union and action, was also one of revolutionary choice. “We have not come to the ranks of the revolution because of novelty or a momentary enthusiasm, nor do we have in it any intentions that the most exalted militant cannot know.

“We are soldiers of the proletarian ideal, from the beginning of the workers’ agitations in Colombia, throughout the entire duration of our activities, we have obtained no other benefit than the satisfaction of having fulfilled our duty.”

Because it is well known throughout the country that spurious elements of all the political failures have unfortunately called themselves revolutionaries, without any other aim than that of vengeance, exploitation and exhibitionism. Centers, syndicates, committees and persons have called themselves revolutionaries and with cunning tricks they have exploited the good proletarian faith and with ridiculous boasting they have wanted to intimidate the easily frightened spirit of a government of scarecrows.

And seeing as we have nothing in common with those parasitic and nasty elements, just as we neither have nor want to make ourselves feared for what we are not, as we expect nothing of pacts or alliances with parties of bourgeois or political rumor-mongering, as the emancipation of the workers must be the work of the workers themselves, the Center of Revolutionary Union, Action and Selection, formed by intellectual workers of all revolutionary tendencies, threw the country its message of fraternity and rebellion which despite all the tyrannies and fanaticisms is the voice of justice that resounds in all regions of agonizing Colombia.

And nothing and no one will extinguish that voice, just as nothing will stop the march of things on the fateful path of evolution.

Therefore, I, as a revolutionary, as a character and a will that may be broken but never gives in, before Judge Lombana’s cruel attitude, will loudly repeat as the proud victim: you can oppress my body, but you will not eclipse my thought.

I do not rectify, I ratify!

My Prisons, My Exiles, My Life

Without Prologue

I do not want anyone to introduce me: Biófilo introduces Panclasta. A book like this is not analyzed — it is felt. This is not a didactic work, or even a literary one. It is the written expression of a strange life. Emotions, sad pages, flashes of happiness and of hope, words...

Life is the soul of modern literature. This is why Gorky, D’Annunzio, Zamacois are the authors of the day. This is why Zola is the father of realism, which is not a literary school but a school of life.

I, “lover of life” (Bió-filo), cannot be unfaithful to my lover. So this is a realistically lived work. Through its pages runs my existence, like a stream, which runs now down a steep, now through a flowered valley, leaving complaints and weeping here, canticles and arpeggios there.

The life of a soldier, an adventurer, an artist. Complex and strange life. Life of a knight without a sword, steed or money.

Life: my lover, woman to the end, is capricious and fickle. She has made me “prince and pauper”; gentleman, beggar, bohemian and colonel.

“I have dined at the table of the great lords” and drank from the cup of shabby drunks. I have slept beneath the golden canopy of dreamy courtesans and shivered through miserable nights on the musty banks of the River Plate and the Seine.

I wore the red sackcloth of the altar boy; my first ideal was to be the priest’s darling. I prayed with the foolish fervor of a bumpkin. I was a fanatic and a mystic. As an anarchist I verged on the madness of Caligula but, at the same time, I have always despised the vile human herd.

I love music with an Apollonian love. I have strummed the lyre and sung to my lover — there are times when I live as a lark among the forests of myrtle and orange blossoms and others as a plucked owl amid shadows.

Justice is for me a cult, but like all gods mine is only in my imagination; its reality depends solely on my will. I hate hatred. I love love. My admiration for everything beautiful is the flower of my soul. My ethics is aesthetics. I bless the water, I profess vice, I despise the addict but I drink wine, chicha... and everything else.

The women who have shared with me their bread and their love — I keep them all in the diamantine coffer of memory, their names sculpted with passionate longings. I have loved them all as Jesus loved Mary Magdalene or as St. Teresa of Ávila loved Christ.

As an old veteran recounts to old comrades, by the warmth of the fire, his exploits of yesteryear, making them collectively live in memory “the idylls of a bygone age,” so do I, in these pages written especially for all my accomplices (even if only for an instant of my life), want to condense emotions, friendships, lived anguishes which bring to fellow souls in the spell of distant memory the invigorating delight of the past which, like everything past, is beautiful...

To you, to all of you — Simons of Cyrene, Gaius Maecenas, Magdalenes, Almas-oasis or Judas Iscariotes — who have put a flower, a thorn or a spine in my life’s path, to you I dedicate these “yellow pages of the road... written with what tears I have left.” (Juan Antonio Perez Bonalde, “Vuelta a la Patria” 1875)

Epiphany

At 5 in the morning, on Sunday, October 26, 1879, my mother bore me in the village of Chinácota, in the house of doctor Emilio Villamizar, he the husband of Mrs. Carmen Leal de Villamizar.

My mother, Simona Lizcano, daughter of talented peasants from Silos, was raised in the home of the well-off quasi-wise-man-peasant Clemente Montañez in Chitagá, from where she left for Pamplona, to the home of Bishop Toscano, and from there to Chinácota, where my father, Bernardo Rojas, met her, loved her... and I came from that free and loving union.

My mother, ashamed of the crime of bearing a child, had to depart from the Villamizar Leal household, taking the road to Pamplona, where she was going to hide the dishonor of being a mother without having followed through with the stupid rituals of a hypocritically consecrated union.

The road is rough and desolate. The temperature is warm and it is rainy. She had walked a few hours, sad and fainting, with a load as beloved as it was heavy. She felt a dizzy spell overcome her, reclined under a tree and began to feel the vertigo of death.

Like that Russian child whose mother, returned from Siberia where her husband had died, died too in the midst of the snow, like that most unhappy orphan I played with the almost stiff face of my mother.

That is all I know.

Of Pamplona, which holds the ineffable treasures of memory in the loveliest age of my life, the first impression I recall is that of my mothers’ silhouette reclining above the Pamplonita river, washing from sunup to sundown, in that place so harsh for nourishing the life of her sole great love. Around 1883, my mother took a post as a cook in the house of Don Santos Carvajal. I have an eternally fresh memory of an earthquake that year, which frightened everyone living in that house.

A priest, Domiciano Valderrama, with a rope around his voluminous gut laughed at the timid women’s fear. I did not flee; I grabbed his robe, making the symbolic figure of clerical Colombia, which was born in that instant and which for almost my whole life I would see yoked to Rome.

Leaving that house, we went to live with my mothers’ sisters. Devout and impenitent Lucía and Guadalupe, and the cruel and ironical Claudia; I have few happy memories of that foggy time.

In 1886, we went to live in a large building that doubled as a public boy’s school. The teachers were Father Mora and Prada, a musician. There I drank my first cup of human knowledge.

And with other days came other teachers. Eliseo Delgado, Eustaquio Mantilla, Andrés Tobón, Pascual Moreno, Félix Marra Jaimes.

By 1890, I was already the best history student. It was like an intuition of the eternal exile of my life.

Having completed my school studies, which I did side by side with my altar boy duties, I began to study Church music with Celestino Villamizar who taught me the staff and the do, re, mi...

In Pamplona, and maybe in Colombia, at that time there was no career other than that of sexton, because the priesthood was forbidden me for being poor and born out of wedlock.

The irony of it all! The three great supporters of the conservative party have been born out of wedlock: Enrique Arboleda C. true savior of clericalism in Palonegro, Marco Fidel Suárez, born leader; Ismael Enrique Arciniégas, lively spokesman.

Pariahs of the Law: Voices of the Desert?

Open letter to esteemed Mr. Dr. Enrique Olaya Herrera (fraternally)

El Diario Nacional, your old organ of admonition and combat, has published in its edition of last Friday a piece addressed to the citizen president of Colombia by a “barbarically whipped Colombian.”

It is a monstrous case, but it is not only not rare, it is frequent. What is strange is that Mr. Pedro J. Amaya has emerged from the horrid tombs that Gomezuelan dungeons are.

Human language has no words that can express all of the evil in those dens, which would have horrified the inquisitors of the middle ages.

Montalvo finds it admirable that Silvio Pellico, in his pained book Mis prisiones, does not show indignation against his captors for their infamy and great cruelty; but I think that what the famous and long-suffering prisoner lacked were words with which to express how much his heart suffered in those torments.

I have also attempted to tell the horrors of my being buried alive for seven years; I have tried to describe the thousand tortures with which Gómez’s tormentors bring death to their innocent victims; I have wished to translate into human language all of the despairing bitterness, all of the fright that my grieving soul suffered in listening to the cries of torture suffered by thousands of companions in those Dantesque pits.

But neither Raphael nor Michelangelo, with their magic brushes, nor Dante, with his infernal quill, could have given a graphical or spoken form to the torments of the Gomezian prisons, never imagined by any sort of Dantesque mind.

I saw with my eyes full of tears the murder of Pedro Piña in the Castle of Puerto Cabello; I was a suffering witness to every instant, my soul grieving for my companion’s pain, of the assassination by hunger of Luis Osorio, in the Valencia jail by infamous order of Emilio Fernández, false son and torturer of the priest Briceño.

I have seen many captives, maddened by hunger, stir up the human shitpiles, trying to feed on putrefaction.

And I do not want to speak of the countryside traps, a torment invented by the ferocious Eustoquio Gómez, nor of the frightening torture of the game bag, which consists in putting a victim in a large game bag, which is then hung from a rafter and made to balance between two rows of bayonets, throwing it from one to the other, producing a death as slow as it is horrifying.

I do not want to remember, without feeling it, the delirium of torture, the twisting of limbs until they break, the torment of the scratches, the horror of the tortol, the stretching of the feet and what is impossible to tell or believe, the attacking of tied-up men by rabid dogs...

But the most common death is from hunger. One, two, three months; the prisoner slowly wastes away; finally the weight of the shackles, the cold of the stones, the cries of torture turn him mad and stupid...

Thousands of victims have suffered a horrible death in these prisons.

Pedro J. Amaya was tortured, but he only stayed a few days and managed to escape a certain and horrifying death. He has had the luck to come before his country... and raise his pained complaint...

Will it be heard?

I also, after seven years buried alive, arrived in July 1921 and visited you in the offices of El Diario Nacional. I visited then-president Marco Fidel Suárez. I told him not of my torments and complaints, but those of so many unfortunate compatriots suffering in the Gomezuelan dungeons.

Don Marco did nothing...

Why?

For the same reason that Caro did nothing, when Gaona was executed, that Marroquín did nothing when Doctor Ricardo Becerra was exiled, or that he himself did something when Doctor Rico and his secretary, the teacher Arciniégas, were expelled from Colombia. For the same reason that Reyes did nothing, when General Herrera and his secretary, Doctor Olaya Herrera, were thrown out. For the same reason that neither Suárez, nor Ospina, nor Abadla Méndez, did nothing for the hundreds of imprisoned, tortured, victimized, unsentenced, though not in any grand way, in Gomezuela.

It’s that we Colombians are, in other lands, legal pariahs.

And since this new administration begins under patriotic and justice-oriented impulses, I think the first duty of the president and his ministers, of the parliamentary representatives, is to defend, to save their unfortunate brothers from the most horrifying of victimizations: that of Juan “the Bison”.

It is incredible, and shameful, that in the American parliament, representatives such as Mr. Gasque, Mr. Sandín, Mr. Ransdell, accuse the Venezuelan government of being unworthy and barbarous, while our legislators have not said a single word in defense of so many compatriots so infamously tortured.

In this city lives Mr. Arturo Lara, who was in shackles for seven years in prison in Caracas; and Mr. Cuervo Osorio, who suffered eight years in the Puerto Cabello fortress, together with many other comrades of Humberto Gómez. And right now, as emotion overwhelms me, I don’t remember more.

Juan Vicente Gómez’s minister in Washington, with a singularly Gomezuelan accuracy but little diplomatic aim, attacked from La Prensa in New York against the above-mentioned humanitarian congressmen, who he describes as impostors, liars, fakes...

Doctor Pedro M. Arcaya describes the painful sacrifice with bloody tears, among shadows and distortions, sent like the last despairing “argh!” of thousand of mothers before the horrifying agony of their children, as anonymous and worthless papers.

The Gomezian minister challenges Mr. Representative Gasque to publish the proofs in the impartial organ of the press Congressional Record, whatever he has against the Venezuelan government.

UGH! It’s enough to say that there is not a handful of Venezuelan dirt that is not washed in the innocent blood of some victim. There is no house, even that of Gómez, where denunciation, terror, misery have not cast their nefarious shadows.

There are no estates, animals, houses in Gomezuela that do not practically belong to the monstrous Juan the Bison.

And if there, where neither peace, nor quiet, nor property are respected, we are assured that freedom and order are the rule, then we must admit that the words have neither ideological nor moral significance.

“No foreign power,” states Minister Arcaya, “no citizen of another country has any reason to get mixed up in our affairs.”

But then why had Gómez tortured, defamed, victimized so many hundreds of innocent foreigners who, as in the case of Humberto Gómez, went to that generous land in search of bread, asylum, wine?

Why was Timoteo Morales Rocha, uncle of the Attic Luis Enrique Osorio, buried for seven years in a pigsty in Valencia, and a brother of Osorio Lizarazo, eight years, and Arturo Lara, nine?

And... Biófilo Panclasta buried alive for seven years. Mundo al Día published a list of prisoners and, horrified, people learned that there are prisoners like Fernando Márquez, who have been in the pit for eighteen years, shackled, whipped.

There’s more... slavery, that infamous dealing in human flesh which, today, all nations are ashamed of, still exists in its most cruel form (and worse) in Venezuela, with slaves bought in unhappy Colombia. In fact, traders in men come from Borure, Motatán, and other towns on Lake Maracaibo, they come to Guajira, and using flattery, gifts, drunken overtures, seduce the poor indians who, tricked by fake offers, march with their families to the refineries and haciendas of Gómez & Accomplices Inc. and once there where they are subjected to the cruelest work and mistreatment, they can never leave because they can never pay what they owe, according to the monstrous contract of iniquous exploitation to which they are subjected.

“No citizen of another country has any reason to get mixed up in our affairs...” but nations, like individuals, have duties to fulfill, if they want rights to demand.

Today Gomezuela is the Cain of the Americas, the Judas of humanity, and if England, Italy, and Germany blocked Venezuela in 1902, for defaulting on debt payments, and Europe allied against imperial Germany, the world today must all unite to raze this Gomezuela, fright and mockery of all humanity.

And we might feel a certain shame, a moral disgust when discussing such matters in an organ of the free press, but like the sheet reproduced in La Prensa in New York, circulating on good paper and clean printing among important people, the Colombian press, which has no commitments to struggle, except with the people, of the people, and by the people of all countries, for the people of Venezuela (Gomezuela) we point to the danger of this propaganda as a danger to the few liberties we still have left.

In Venezuela, where the reading of a newspaper like El Tiempo from Bogotá, Mexico, or Santo Domingo is a crime, in Venezuela where the very Olaya Herrera was thrown out, in Gomezuela a Colombian and worst of all liberal president is not honored except because Gómez is getting ready to personally conquer Colombia.

In 1898, an Italian squadron under Candiani came armed for battle to claim the debt of that adventurer Cerruti, who, posing as a liberal guerillero, robbed, laid waste to, and even went so far as to offend the people’s traditional respect for the clergy, committing dirty sacrileges. That was when an ungrateful son of Colombia, crespist president of Venezuela, honored that Admiral who attacked Colombia with the Order of the Liberator. At which time the Colombians honored with that dishonorable Order renounced such a worthless honor.

And today that you, a journalist, Attic republican, spotless democrat, sole legal president in the Americas, have accepted that Order, we who admire you, we who are proud to be Colombians, who aspire to a respected and respectable nation, free, great and dignified, we can do nothing but exclaim, along with that famous ancient warrior who said to his commander who turned him over to the enemy: “Oh, how poorly you know your friends and our enemies”.

And it is sad to say, when all of the press condemns the infamous Gomecracy, when students and workers, those two wings of the eagle-nation, protest the Gomezuelan representative, for the torments of the Colombians under the lash of Juan the Bison, the liberal police defends the agent of the autocrat, as if showing solidarity with that monstrous enemy of Colombia.

Seven Years Buried Alive in a Gomezuelan Dungeon

The Horrifying Story of a Man Revived

Deflowering Memory

Words — as an aesthete once said — are nothing but the reflection of ideas. And if ideas cannot be faithfully translated into human language, then much less so can feelings.

If poetry is the music of words and music is the poetry of sounds, it is necessary to confess that great sorro