“Guayaquil”: the play that recreates the only meeting of San Martin and Bolívar returned to Lima

This is one of the greatest mysteries of our republican history, an event for which until today there are no letters, documents, or signatures: What happened in the interview held by the liberators Simón Bolívar and José de San Martín in Guayaquil, July 26 and 27, 1822? What exactly did they talk about? What determined that San Martín renounced his independence quest and gave Bolívar his path to glory? And also: What was the role of Manuela Sáenz and Rosa Campuzano after the decisions of the liberators?

The presence in Lima of Mario Diament for the revival of the play directed by Javier Valdez offers us the privilege of putting these questions to the author himself. With works such as “Franz & Albert”, about a fortuitous meeting between Kafka and Einstein in Warsaw, or “A report on the banality of love”, about the complex relationship between the philosophers Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt in times of Nazism, It is clear that the Argentine playwright is an author with an evident curiosity for history. Or rather, he specifies, because of the mysteries or the unusual encounters within the historical account. “I am interested in discovering or imagining what happened in certain circumstances, breaking the canonical visions of history and reaching, from this type of characters, deeper reflections”, he explains.

Being Argentine, it is clear that one of the most interesting challenges at the time of writing “Guayaquil” was trying to understand a personality like that of General Don José de San Martín. A complex task because, as Diament confesses, Argentines “are not allowed” to think of San Martin outside of the bronze effigy with which they hammer children’s heads from school. “He is a stiff character, who will never pee,” jokes an author, who always wondered the possible reason for that “renunciation” that characterizes the Liberator.

“The truth is that there is not much glory in giving something up. That is why, before delving into her story, I did not believe her very much. It is not that he does not rescue the figure of San Martín, but it is certainly complex: he hardly lived in Argentina, since he left very young to fight for Spain in the Royal Force, and when he returned to the country, if he stayed seven months it is a lot”, he warns.

Perhaps it is because of this distance that, for the playwright, San Martín always passed over the political ambitions of his contemporaries. “He was not part of the political wars after independence, as he refused to participate in them. He was not even very well liked in his time, both by Argentines and Peruvians ”comment.

According to Diament, to write a play starring San Martín and Bolívar in the context of the mysterious Guayaquil Conference, he had to find a dramatic point of view. “What was actually said must have been extremely boring, as military-to-military conversations tend to be. For this reason, I thought that entering from the side of his ambitions, and of the political chess of the generals and their lovers, would be much more interesting”Explain.

Seeking to sharpen the conflicts, the Argentine author places both generals in the most difficult days of their respective campaigns. “For San Martín, his government in Peru was painful, stalked as it was by the opposition forces, while Bolívar resented the weight of San Martín in his plans. In addition, there is the coincidence that Rosa Campuzano and Manuela Sáenz were close friends, and that San Martín knew them before Bolívar. All this opened up an almost naughty game for me. And that was a very interesting dramatic situation for me,” he notes.

With this approach, Diament found the answer to explain the great resignation of San Martín: more than giving up the glory of the final battle, he went for the love of a woman. “And nobody could prove me otherwise because there is no documentation!”adds the writer.

—How poorly we study history to the extent that the narrative of the independence struggle is presented as an overwhelming movement, forgetting the contradictions and the battles that Spain also won…

Countries build the narrative that suits them. And it is, generally, a false narrative. In Argentine history there are very unpleasant characters, but they are all heroes, all put on the same level. Belgrano coexists with Rosas and Lavalle. The interesting thing for an author is to transcend that and have a skeptical look at what we learned as children.

—Although your work is believable from the dramatic point of view, how was it received by the historical academy? Did it spark any debate?

Perhaps I was not long enough in the places where the work was presented to perceive it. However, of all the criticisms he had in Argentina, none questioned that premise. When it happened in Ecuador, precisely in Guayaquil, the people of Guayaquil were a little scandalized when they talked about the banality of its inhabitants or the smell of excrement from the river. I know that there was a debate between historians organized by the theater itself, but none of them agreed. I got away pretty clean.

—There are so many portraits of San Martín and many others painted of Bolívar. But very few are known of Sáenz and Campuzano. How invisible have they been to our history?

Manuela Sáenz was directly involved in Bolívar’s campaign. I think that Rosa Campusano rather played the role of her lover. She enjoyed the position this gave her. His was more of a courtly spirit.

—Your work premiered in Peru almost as the most intimate and desecrating event in our bicentennial celebration. Did Argentina know how to take advantage of the opportunity to think about its process as an independent republic?

When the play premiered in Argentina, there was resentment. The director was very concerned about the political climate at the time, in the Kirchner government. It was said that while America was trying to appear united, I was presenting the two liberators as rivals. I had a lot of discussions about it. We live in a time of so many lies, so much misrepresentation, so much ignorance, that this discussion about the damage that a play can do to a current of thought seems ridiculous to me.