STRANGE STATESMEN
One foot in the grave
A plague hits a remote village, leading to total memory-loss among its inhabitants… a baby with the tail of a pig is eaten alive by ants… an orphan knocks on a door, carrying a bag filled with her parents’ jumbled bones. These are not random events culled from old back-issues of FT, but plot developments in one of the novels of Gabriel García Márquez (1927-2014), patron saint of the literary movement known as Magical Realism, in which absurd or supernatural events intrude upon everyday life as a matter of course. In 1982, the Colombian Márquez won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and gave his opinion that ‘Magical Realism’ was really just another form of ‘Realism’
– within a Latin American context, at least. The Land of Eldorado’s real-life history was often more unbelievable than were his own tales of wild fantasy, and his literary compatriots’ main problem, Márquez stated in his Nobel acceptance speech, was that “we have had to ask but little of imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of means to render our [real] lives believable.” 1 Another genre of literature to which Márquez contributed was the so-called ‘Dictator Novel’, in which the lives of the many military strongmen who have ruled so much of the area down the years were explored, whether realistically or otherwise. 2
Following the Spanish Empire’s retreat from the continent between around 1810 and 1830, much of South and Central America descended into a prolonged period of revolutionary and counter-revolutionary chaos and bloodshed. Such a climate proved perfect for the rise of a new – and sadly enduring – type of national leader, the caudillo, or military dictator. Márquez considered these figures, all-powerful gods in human form and full-dress uniform, to be Latin America’s greatest contribution to world mythology; strange, almost fairytale figures whose often incredible antics deserved to be remembered, no matter how evil they may have been. To illustrate his point, during his Nobel speech, Márquez reminded his audience briefly of three of the very strangest caudillos of all. Over the
next three articles, let us take each of these figures in turn, and try to sift the men from the myth – if such a thing is even possible.
ONCE UPON A TIME IN MEXICO
“I’ve got nothing against your right leg… trouble is, neither have you”; so said Peter Cook to Dudley Moore’s one-legged actor applying for the part of Tarzan in a classic episode of Not Only But Also. Perhaps the monopod Moore should instead have sought to fill the less physically challenging role of Márquez’s first great dictator, General Antonio López de Santa Anna (1794-1876), whose own peg-legged nature proved to be a genuine career asset, rather than leaving him the lame duck you might presume. According to Márquez’s Nobel speech, Santa Anna, “three times dictator of Mexico, held a magnificent funeral for the right leg he had lost in the so-called ‘Pastry War’.” Sadly, as you might expect of such a ridiculous statement, this claim was somewhat inaccurate; it was, of course, Santa Anna’s left leg which he lost and had ostentatiously buried as a result of a brutal military conflict over pastryproducts, not his right one.
Best known for his defeat of Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie and other such legendary Texan rebels at the Battle of the Alamo in 1836, the ‘Napoleon of the West’ served as President of Mexico on no fewer than 11 separate occasions between 1833 and 1855, sometimes as dictator, sometimes as democrat, but always as a shameless political opportunist. An insight into Santa Anna’s character can be gleaned from the fact that he twice married girls under the age of 16 and then didn’t even bother to turn up to the wedding ceremonies, authorising proxies to stand in for him, eager only to
receive a rich dowry from each child’s well-off father. The only one of his weddings that Santa Anna ever deigned to actually attend was a fake one; a story is told of a 17-year-old girl named Melchora Barrera to whom the General took a fancy, but who refused to give in to his advances unless he agreed to marry her. Santa Anna consented, and did what appeared to be the honourable thing – until it subsequently transpired that the ‘priest’ who had carried out the ceremony was one of his own troops in disguise, thus rendering the nuptials wholly void. 3
Clearly, this was a man willing to adopt almost any temporary stance to get on in life. Following Mexico’s independence from
Spain in 1821, the confused climate of coup and counter-coup suited the ambitions of a protean strongman like Santa Anna well, but he had been forced to retire from public life in disgrace following the ultimate success of the Texan rebellion, which saw that territory gain its independence from Mexico even in spite of the Alamo’s loss. In 1838, however, Santa Anna saw his chance for redemption.
A pastry-chef known to history only as ‘Monsieur Remontel’ claimed that a gang of Mexican army officers had looted his shop on the outskirts of Mexico City of all its valuable sausage rolls, jam tarts and vanilla slices, vandalising the place as they went. Even though his shop and its contents were realistically valued at no more than 1,000 pesos, Remontel made an official complaint to the French King, Louis-Philippe, overvaluing his shop at an absurd 60,000 pesos, enough to live off for life. Having various other grievances against Mexico, the French took Remontel’s complaint into account and demanded payment of 600,000 pesos from the Mexican government as compensation for accumulated financial slights allegedly made against France and her citizens abroad. When Mexico refused to pay, French warships began blockading and bombarding Mexican ports, and war was declared between the countries – Pastry War! The newly-free Texans then helped worsen the blockade by preventing vital pastry-making ingredients such as flour from passing south of the border, thus leaving the poor Mexican people unable even to eat cake; the conflict is actually known as ‘The War of the Cakes’ in Spanish. General Santa Anna spied his opportunity for rehabilitation, and so the alleged ‘Saviour of the Motherland’, as he was now calling himself, took up arms again, leading his troops into battle at the captured port-city of Veracruz, where on 5 February 1839 a volley from an enemy cannon hit him, shattering his ankle and requiring the amputation of his left leg, a sacrifice which seemed in vain. Mexico soon caved in, agreed to French demands, and the rather pointless clash ended with the withdrawal of French troops on 9 March. 4
A DEAD LEG
However, the loss of Santa Anna’s limb proved the making of him politically. Craftily turning his disability into an asset, General Santa Anna transformed himself into a national hero by creating a new, quasireligious nationalist cult around his severed leg. Aware of the old Catholic tradition of venerating the body parts of Saints as holy relics, Santa Anna kept hold of his bloody limb and decided to transform it into a holy relic, too, tapping into strongly Catholic Mexico’s traditions for his own gain.
Initially, the lost leg spent four years buried away safely at Santa Anna’s hacienda near Veracruz, until late 1841 when he was asked to take up the Presidency once again
HE INTENDED TO PARADE THE LEG BEFORE CROWDS OF ONLOOKERS
by those who had had enough of his rivals’ reign. With the national coffers near empty and the country in a mess, this time the General was to rule Mexico his own way, as an outright dictator, rather than a supposed democrat, as he had done previously. After all, by losing his leg for his country, he had surely earned the right to govern the land as he saw fit? To hammer this message home, Santa Anna had his lost leg disinterred, intending to parade it before crowds of onlookers. Sadly, it looked a bit worse for wear after so long underground, and the newlyrestored El Presidente had it sealed within an ornate crystal urn and then placed within a small coffin before the parade began; no doubt the risk of a stray dog running off with his blessed bones was just too great to take.
At 11 o’clock on the morning of 27 September 1842, a huge religious procession began to wind its way through the Mexican capital, stopping only when it reached the Santa Paula Cemetery. Shaded from the sun by veils, top army and government officials led the parade, followed by a group of military pallbearers carrying the sacred leg in its coffin on some kind of display-platform. Two regiments of infantry, a squadron of cavalry, and a detachment of artillery followed behind. When it reached the graveyard, the procession halted before a brand-new mausoleum which had been constructed: a kind of large vertical column, intended to hold the General’s leg. A Mexican flag flapped away atop the monument, and a real-life cannon was built into it, too, illustrating how the leg was lost. Fawning eulogies, prayers and poetry were read to the hallowed limb by various prominent figures, before the leg in its urn was locked away inside the structure by the War Minister while Santa Anna looked approvingly on. Following festivities and fireworks, the military then gave their own personal salute to the glorious appendage by firing off salvos from their assembled ordnance.
However, despite appearances, all was not well with Santa Anna’s leg. Elements within the Catholic Church objected to the burial as an obscene parody, and it was rumoured that the cemetery’s dead were united in ghostly rebellion against the humiliating idea of being ruled over by a severed leg. Ignoring such rumblings, once again Santa Anna invaded Texas and tried raising domestic taxes to refill
the Mexican Treasury (which he himself often plundered). However, both measures succeeded only in enflaming public opinion against him further, and in 1844 statues of Santa Anna were toppled across Mexico City. Worse, the monument to his leg was assaulted and ransacked, with the severed limb itself being smashed from its crystal urn and dragged through the streets on a rope by a baying mob chanting “Death to the cripple!” 5
Unlike Peter Cook, it turned out the people of Mexico did have something against their leader’s leg, after all; yet again, Santa Anna was forced to cede power to others. A décima (Mexican broadside or street-ballad) from the time provides a punning insight into the level of public disillusionment with the one-time all-powerful caudillo:
At other times this foot was earnestly respected; but that was when its owner still held us in subjugation. Today, the people have treated it like a dirty old bone, because the nation no longer wishes to stand for it. 6
LEGENDS OF THE LEG’S END
Santa Anna himself was also no longer able to stand without the aid of an artificial limb, opting to have two top-of-the-range wood-and-cork ones made for him in New York, at a cost of $1,300; each came with a black jackboot attached to the prosthesis itself via ball-bearings at the ankle, thus allowing the foot to swivel. The surgeon had left a length of Santa Anna’s bone protruding from his thigh during amputation, so the wooden legs really had to be bespoke ones. So impressive was his main specially commissioned prosthesis that Santa Anna was known to wave the thing around over his head while riding on parade, to rally his troops or remind citizens of his sacrifice.
Strangely, Santa Anna’s favourite fake limb has fared rather better than his real fleshy one ever did in terms of its status as a quasi-relic, being currently on display behind glass in the Illinois Military Museum, Springfield, where it is accorded revered status as the star attraction. But how did it arrive there?
In 1847, the General’s wooden leg was captured as spoils of war by the 4th
Regiment of Illinois Volunteers after the Battle of Cerro Gordo during the Mexican-American War of 1846-48, a re-run of old enmities in which Santa Anna had once again chosen to fight. Legend has it that the unfortunate General fled the field of action on a donkey after being surprised by a raiding party of US troops, in his panic leaving behind $18,000 in gold, an uneaten roast-chicken and two left legs, one of the valuable bespoke ones and a simple spare wooden peg. Reputedly, the gleeful American troops stole Santa Anna’s gold, ate his chicken, and played a game of baseball with his cheaper limb as the bat. His main false leg was kept for posterity, which is how it came to repose in Springfield’s Military Museum. 7
In the early 1980s Santa Anna’s peg leg was reported to have been re-found, too, and is now displayed at the Governor Oglesby Mansion in Decatur, Illinois. However, the leg appears to be just a standard antique medical item, and could really have belonged to anyone. Nonetheless, if you want to travel to the Mansion in order to stare at a random prosthesis displayed behind glass, then you can. 8
THE GAME IS AFOOT
Dubious legends about Santa Anna’s leg now have a life of their own. Was it really used to play baseball, for instance? One version of the story has it that the leg was appropriated by US General Abner Doubleday, the supposed inventor of baseball itself, and used by him to stage the first ever ball game held in Mexico, which served to introduce the sport to the natives. Given that Doubleday has since been shown not to have invented baseball after all, such tales can probably be chalked up as blackly humorous myths.
Today, possession of the main captured limb is subject to a tug-ofwar (sadly not literally) between Illinois and Texas; Texans say their nemesis’s limb belongs on display in the Alamo, while Illinois folk are keen to give such claims the boot. Confusingly, it is often said that Mexico also want their former cruel and corrupt dictator’s leg back, despite this being the rough equivalent of Angela Merkel requesting the return of Hitler’s missing gonad. Santa Anna is not too popular in Mexico these days, due to the massive amounts of territory he lost (or occasionally sold) during his constant wars against the Yankees; Texas, Utah, California, Arizona, Nevada, Colorado and New Mexico, all were surrendered to Washington, in total or in part. Following American entry into WWII, Illinois did propose donating the leg to Mexico in the name of “hemispheric solidarity” against fascism, but the offer came to naught.
It turns out that Santa Anna’s other bespoke prosthesis is already on display in a Mexico City museum anyway, and so his countrymen are in no pressing need of two left feet. However, in 1998 an episode of the likeable Texas-set cartoon series King of the Hill called ‘The Final Shinsult’ featured a plot-line in which the characters took a rare break from selling propane and propane accessories to kidnap Santa Anna’s leg from its museum, for reasons both complex and unlikely. The episode featured a fake plea at the end, with a voice-over begging people to “join the movement to help return the leg to the Mexican people”, which was apparently taken seriously by some of the show’s more simple-minded viewers, who contacted the
Mexican Embassy for further details. No spot of light body-snatching was actually required of them, though.
Following further embarrassing military and political escapades, Santa Anna was forced into exile from Mexico from 1855 onwards. While banished in New York and seeking cash to fund yet another tilt at power, he became the first man to introduce a rudimentary form of chewing gum to the US, in the form of the product’s base ingredient chicle; sadly, he mis-developed the gum as a possible cheaper alternative to rubber-tyres as opposed to a confectionaryitem. Selling on surplus supplies to his inventive secretary Thomas Adams, Santa Anna was surprised to see Adams add flavouring to the stuff and start telling people to put it in their mouths, not on their carriage-wheels, thereby creating a new taste sensation. Santa Anna never made a cent from the new fad and, tried in absentia for treason once the extent of his depletion of the national coffers became known, there seemed no way back to his homeland. In 1874, however, Santa Anna took advantage of a general amnesty to hop back across the border where, virtually blind and penniless, he lived a short time longer before dying in Mexico City on 21 June 1876, aged 82. He was then buried, with full military honours, in a glass coffin in the Panteón de Tepeyac Cemetery. If anyone wants to dig him up and sell him to the Texas Tourist-Board, I’m sure he’s still there.
NEXT TIME: ‘The Body of Christ’. Meet the second of Gabriel García Márquez’s curious caudillos; the saintly moving corpse of Ecuador whose death was predicted by the Virgin Mary and caused by Freemasons.
NOTES
1 Speech online at www.nobelprize.org/nobel_ prizes/literature/laureates/1982/marquez-lecture. html; all subsequent Márquez quotes are taken from here.
2 Hoping to make his own novels more realistic, Márquez himself used to submit early drafts to his good friend Fidel Castro to read; the Cuban dictator then passed them back, annotated with no doubt highly accurate advice about what calibre bullets would be used by certain characters, and other such vital matters of personal dictatorial experience. See www. theguardian.com/books/2016/dec/06/fidel-castroworked-on-gabriel-garcia-marquez-manuscripts
3 See http://daccrossley.typepad.com/my_ weblog/2013/01/santa-annas-other-mistress. html for a typical modern-day retelling of the tale in its most elaborate form; http://alamostudies. proboards.com/thread/60 has informed discussion as to what extent this was actually a true story – there are certainly plenty of variants.
4 www.history.com/news/the-pastry-war-175-yearsago; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pastry_War.
5 Shannon Baker, ‘Antonio López de Santa Anna’s Search for Personalised Nationalism’ in Samuel Brunk & Ben Fallow (eds) Heroes and Hero-Cults in Latin America, University of Texas Press, 2006, pp.67-70; account also online at www.dsloan.com/Auctions/A23/item-santa-annaleg-1842.html. In thus appropriating Catholicism, Santa Anna was actually only following his political predecessors’ good example. See www.huichawaii.org/assets/baker,-shannon-l.--federalists,-traditionalists-and-santanistas.pdf.
6 Some décimas devoted to this subject are online at http://inside.sfuhs.org/dept/history/ Mexicoreader/Chapter4/poemssantaannaleg.html. Feel free to insert your own joke about metrical feet here, by the way.
7 www.latinamericanstudies.org/mex-war/santaanna-leg.htm; http://www.chicagoreader.com/ chicago/public-displays-santa-annas-life-and-limb/ Contact?=oid=902666.
8 http://herald-review.com/news/local/ oglesby-mansion-may-be-home-to-one-of-santaanna/article_50390e9a-c43b-50a5-9ca481f53ad86010.html.
9 For a typical retelling of the baseball legend, see http://votto1234.blogspot.co.uk/2010/10/ antonio-lopez-de-santa-anna-his-wooden.html.
10 www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/ public-displays-santa-annas-life-and-limb/ Contact?=oid=902666; www.dallasnews. com/opinion/editorials/2016/11/02/illinoisholds-fast-santa-annas-leg-texas-neversurrenders; www.roadsideamerica.com/ story/18808; http://kingofthehillwikia.com/wiki/ The_Final_Shinsult; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Antonio_L%C3%83pez_de_Santa_Anna.
11 www.uh.edu/engines/epi963.htm; http://www. history.com/news/history-lists/6-things-you-maynot-know-about-santa-anna;
12 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_López_ de_Santa_Anna.