Recovered Letter from Venezuela’s “Great Liberator” to Be Turned over to Historical Archive

Caracas, June 2^nd 2013 (Venezuelanalysis.com) – During a meeting on Friday with the Bolivarian governors of Venezuela, President Nicolas Maduro announced the recovery of one of the letters of Simon Bolivar.

“Original, an historical jewel” he said, removing its casing to show the signature of South America’s “Great Liberator.”

“This is the signature of the Grand Patriotic Pole, of the patriots of Venezuela … the signature of our homeland,” he said.

He indicated that the letter, obtained by current Venezuelan Ambassador to the United Nations Samuel Moncado while serving as Ambassador in London, was written to the Congress of Peru after the battles of Junín and Ayacucho in 1824, which secured the independence of Peru and the rest of South America.

“I have concluded victoriously the labor which you called upon me to complete,” Maduro read. “Having completed my work, I put myself at your service. I put the full powers that have been granted to me at the service of the Congress of Peru,” he read.

Maduro extolled Bolívar’s “modesty” and denounced the “Peruvian oligarchy, who within Peru have spoken against Bolívar, and continue to do so.”

He also praised the role of Bolívar’s Venezuelan troops in the struggle – “from here, from El Caribe, from the Venezuelan plains, they went to liberate, to found Lima and Peru. That’s an historical truth.”

“For the historical memory” the letter will be turned over to the General Archive of the Nation, which maintains digitalized collections of the letters of Bolívar and Francisco de Miranda. The letters were transferred to the archive from the National Academy of History after a 2010 decree by former President Hugo Chavez with the goal of recovering “the historical memory of the struggles for liberation of the Venezuelan people.” These struggles, the decree read, “have been hidden for political reasons, against the revolutionary process.”