Un manoseo franquista de Bolívar y otros tocamientos The article examines how the myth of Simón Bolívar has been used to justify authoritarian power, drawing parallels with Francisco Franco’s dictatorship. An essay by Ernesto Giménez Caballero argued that Franco actualized Bolívar’s true authoritarian intentions by establishing a life-presidency and organic cortes, contrasting it with Bolívar’s failed attempts and the eventual establishment of a republic. The author criticizes how both Franco and later, Hugo Chávez, manipulated Bolívar’s image to legitimize their regimes.

• The myth of Simón Bolívar has been used to justify the concentration of power and the erasure of republics.
• An essay by Ernesto Giménez Caballero, ‘El parangón entre Bolívar y Franco’, suggests Franco completed Bolívar’s authoritarian project.
• Giménez Caballero claimed Franco realized the ‘authentic Bolivarian thought’ by establishing a life-presidency and organic cortes, akin to a restored monarchy.
• Bolívar’s attempts at a lasting, centralized government were hindered by tuberculosis and nascent republican societies.
• The article criticizes the use of Bolívar’s image by both Franco and Hugo Chávez to legitimize authoritarian rule.
• Italian historian Gioacchino Volpe once called Bolívar a ‘tropical successor of Julius Caesar and antecedent of Mussolini’, a comparison revisited in the context of Franco and Chávez.