Desperate Times

Bolivar exhumed

Jul 22nd 2010, 11:38 by The Economist | CARACAS

Venezuela’s president buries bad news by disinterring a national icon

FOR a president facing a weak economy and declining popularity, a centuries-old murder mystery could prove a useful distraction. Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez is not one to let the lack of any such mystery stand in his way. On July 15th, at the president’s order, a team of white-clad soldiers and forensic scientists opened the lead coffin holding the remains of Simón Bolívar, the Caracas-born South American independence hero. He was exhumed to see if he died of tuberculosis, as historians assert, or was poisoned by political rivals—“crucified like Christ,” as Mr Chávez insists.

The president has long idolised Bolívar, the nation’s secular saint. He even renamed the country the “Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.” Although Bolívar was in fact quite conservative, Mr Chávez sees him as a socialist, and advertises his own movement as the long-delayed realisation of the Liberator’s dream. In this scheme, the descendants of the “oligarchs” and “imperialists” who purportedly killed Bolívar are now plotting to assassinate his ideological heir.

Mr Chávez first aired his revisionist theory of Bolívar’s murder on the anniversary of his death, in 2007, just two weeks after the president had lost a referendum on constitutional reform. The next month he set up a commission to investigate the claim incorporating ten ministers and the vice-president.

With legislative elections looming this September, Mr Chávez decided that 180 years of mystery were too many. In a 19-hour operation, a scan was taken of Bolívar’s skull, and samples were extracted from his teeth and vertebrae. They will now be tested for authenticity. But according to Mr Chávez, his own doubts were assuaged by Bolívar himself, who helpfully called out “Yes, it’s me” from the grave. “I confess we wept,” the president later wrote on Twitter. “That glorious skeleton must be Bolívar, for we could feel his spark.”

Once the forensic analysis is over, Bolívar will be resealed in a new coffin, wrapped in a new flag and—during next year’s bicentennial celebrations—interred in a new mausoleum. A useful by-product is that his remains will then be separated at last from those of heroes who are not to Mr Chávez’s taste.