posted by Oscar José Márquez**
General Jose Antonio Páez El
Centauro, Dibujo de 1973 por Angel Parra Dibujo
José Antonio Páez
(Esta reseña va acompañada por un video que pueden bajar de www.youtube.com, elaborado por el amigo José Francisco Romero)
(Esta reseña va acompañada por un video que pueden bajar de www.youtube.com, elaborado por el amigo José Francisco Romero)
Sus guerreros lo llamaban “El Taita”, porque para ellos era eso: un padre. Su arrojo y desempeño en los campos de batalla de Colombia y Venezuela le valió el título de Centauro de los Llanos. Sus padres lo bautizaron José Antonio Páez. El León de Payara, como también se llamó al catire Páez, nació en la población de Curpa, en lo que es hoy el estado Portuguesa. Páez ocupa un lugar destacadísimo en la historia de Venezuela, República a la cual gobernó como Presidente constitucional en tres ocasiones.
La figura de Páez encarna el carácter y el recio
temple que identifica al genuino llanero venezolano, formado a pulso en las
faenas del llano, enfrentando los rigores del medio y, en su caso, la severidad
de Manuelote, el mayordomo del Hato La Calzada, de Manuel Pulido, donde
trabajaba y terminó de curtirse como hombre llanero, conocedor de todos los
rumbos de ese llano de leyendas.
Fue uno de los ideólogos de la consolidación del
estado de Venezuela y su actuación en los campos de batalla durante la guerra de
independencia despertaba admiración, incluso entre las filas realistas.
Vuelvan Caras
Las Queseras del Medio fue el mayor triunfo de la
carrera militar del general Páez. En esta batalla El Centauro de los Llanos se
enfrentó con solo 150 lanceros, mal vestidos, pies descalzos y sin muchos
conocimientos de la guerra, armados solamente con lanzas, al mariscal Pablo
Morillo, cuyo ejército tenía seis mil militares de escuela, bien comidos y bien
vestidos, a quienes venció. Páez sólo perdió a dos de sus llaneros “pata en el
suelo” en aquel campo de batalla ardiente, de sol reverberante que quemaba los
pies.
Tras esa batalla, Simón Bolívar otorgó la medalla
“Cruz de los Libertadores” a los 148 lanceros que regresaron triunfantes con su
jefe Páez al frente. Esta hazaña militar de Páez y sus llaneros causó ira al rey
Fernando VII, quien reclamó duramente a Pablo Morillo que hubiese perdido ante
unos hombres que estaban en desventaja numérica, a lo cual el mariscal derrotado
contestó por correo al monarca: “Dadme un José Antonio Páez, majestad, y mil
lanceros del Apure, y pondré a Europa a vuestros pies”.
Reconocía así el militar español, sin pena alguna, la
valentía, inteligencia, arrojo y astucia del gran guerrero nacido en Portuguesa
y jefe militar indiscutible de los llanos venezolanos. Las Queseras del Medio,
en Apure, fue la batalla de aquel famoso grito de “Vuelvan Caras”. En la batalla
de Carabobo, el 24 de junio de 1821, perdió Páez a su más fiel y destacado
soldado, Pedro Camejo, el Negro Primero, el más grande negro de la historia
militar venezolana.
José Antonio Páez era epiléptico y cada vez que iba a
entrar en batalla le daba el ataque, hecho que aumentaba la angustia de sus
llaneros. De ese trance salía como impulsado por una fuerza extraordinaria y se
mostraba invencible ante los realistas. A pesar de esta dolencia, el llamado
Libertador del Apure salió vencedor en todas las batallas que libró solo con sus
llaneros. En toda su carrera militar solamente perdió una, en la que se enfrentó
junto con Simón Bolívar a los realistas.
Cuando ingresó a las filas patriotas, Páez era casi
analfabeta, pues en Guama apenas aprendió con la maestra de este pueblo
portugueseño a garabatear palotes, como narra él mismo en su autobiografía.
Pero, con constancia y tenacidad se instruyó él sólo y con el roce social,
especialmente en Valencia, junto a su amante Barbarita Nieves, adquirió una gran
cultura y un gran refinamiento, lo cual le sirvió para codearse más tarde con
los más famosos personajes en las cortes europeas.
Compositor, coplero y bailador
El “León de Payara” fue compositor y hasta cantó ópera
cuando anduvo por Europa y en altas esferas sociales en el nuevo mundo. Durante
la guerra emancipadora cantó y bailó. Sus biógrafos le recuerdan organizando
fandangos, es decir, el joropo de nuestros días, junto con su guardia de honor.
Siendo presidente de Venezuela fue uno de los fundadores, en 1831, de la
Sociedad Filarmónica, en los muchos conciertos que se hacían en su residencia,
en compañía de su amante Barbarita Nieves.
Durante su destierro en Buenos Aires compuso cinco
títulos en homenaje a unos niños vecinos suyos. Estas composiciones se conservan
en el Museo Histórico bonaerense, se lee en textos que narran pasajes de la vida
del gran centauro llanero.
Los compositores venezolanos, especialmente los
nativos de Apure y el resto de los estados llaneros se inspiraron en la gesta de
Páez, anécdotas y vivencias del general José Antonio Páez, conocidos a través de
sus padres o leídas en los libros que cuentan su historia, incluida su
autobiografía, para narrar musicalmente las vivencias guerreras y cotidianas del
Centauro de Los Llanos.
Entre algunas de las composiciones en las cuales los
cantantes de música criolla cuentan la trayectoria de Páez están:
CATORCE CARGAS POR LA LIBERTAD (NELSON MORALES) arpa Omar Moreno.
CATORCE CARGAS POR LA LIBERTAD (NELSON MORALES) arpa Omar Moreno.
LAS QUESERAS DEL MEDIO (AUTOR E INTERPRETE ENEAS
PERDOMO
AL GENERAL PAEZ (Autor: José Romero Bello/cantan José
Romero B. y Carrao de Palmarito. Arpa Joseíto Romero)
LA MARCHA DE PÁEZ Autor e Intérprete ENEAS PERDOMO/
Arpa Eugenio Bandres
La música que acompaña a esta reseña la pueden oir y
ver en el video (youtube) elaborado por José Francisco Romero,a partir de la
melodía de José Romero Bello, donde canta con Juan de Los Santos Contreras: AL
GENERAL PAEZ (de mi discoteca). El acompañamiento musical es de JOSEITO ROMERO y
su conjunto. Bello marco musical para una pieza de colección. DISFRUTENLO
AL GENERAL
PAEZ
*Tomado, con autorización, de los blog:
Jose Antonio Páez and hard exile
http://www.centrorisorse.org/jose-antonio-paez-and-hard-exile.html
El General Jose Antonio Páez, Litografia
de 1858 realizada por Francois D´Avignon 0,52 x 0,405
Tomado
de:
History has noted, described, drawn through studies such as Jose
Antonio Paez untamed plains which expired with his spear went beyond all the
difficulties and obstacles, so we understand when you start your passage through
life from 13 domestic June 1790, CURP along the river near the town of Acarigua,
because of a personal problem reaches the Hato La Calzada in Apure state, owned
by Don Manuel Pulido, who shelters him as a pawn on the orders of the foreman
called Manuelote . That was an exile far from home, and then at the end of his
life he will play other harder.
In this herd learns that life’s rudeness ranger tasks and to describe
the craft of sale and purchase of livestock, which will serve later.
To be the beginning of the struggle for independence, the owner of
the herd as a cavalry squadron and Paez, barely 20 years old he enlisted in him
and begins to provide services to the fatherland, that mother is going to be
intangible from the time the reason for their existence, to achieve
independence.
Since then the indomitable cloudscape catire Paez, begins to furrow
the sky with the force of the burrowing shower and with the grace of the
rainbow, leaving a trail pair go fruitful accomplished facts, which are oriented
towards the major destinations of Venezuela.
With the capture of the castle of Puerto Cabello in 1823, the last
Spanish stronghold in Venezuela, a new administration begins to occupy the
foreground in the conduct of the highest destiny of the country, not the head of
his spear as he did in The Yagual The Middle Queseras, Mucuritas or Carabobo,
but deploying the administrative action that will make way for the statesman,
the man who is growing and gaining the office of the magistrate to drive and
build with their efforts and those around him, the new republic.
The first stones on the road
In forming the Great Colombia from 1821, acting for the Civil and
Military Chief of the Department of Venezuela, receives orders from the Vice
President of it, Gen. Francisco de Paula Santander, in the year 1825, before a
possible attack by government Spanish to regain their overseas provinces, to
organize a body of militia in Venezuela, which is why it is necessary to order
the enlistment of citizens available to integrate them.
Before this order, General Paez calls on all Venezuelans in a
position to integrate military and as such they do not respond to the call,
proceeded to make a public recruitment. This is seen by some as an act of force,
is reported to the executive by the mayor to Venezuela, General Juan Escalona,
who seeks to defend the rights of citizens, just as the city of Caracas,
presented to the Congress of Colombia an indictment of General Paez, taking as a
pretext to declare the country in assembly, as noted by the same Paez, during
the revolutionary movement in Petare occurred in 1824 and which had been
contained and dissolved by the same centaur.
This fact appears to be the first clash of General Paez with
management and legal order of the republic, but this is assumed to manifest
solidarity of the citizens of Caracas, they’re going to find his house and take
him to the chapter of the capital municipality and reinstate him in command
according to the letter that it sends to the Liberator Simon Bolivar, on May 1,
1826.
Restored to service as civil and military chief of Venezuela, issued
a new proclamation to the inhabitants of the Department of Venezuela, on 19 May
of that year, by which guaranteed peace and public health.
From that moment he began to speak of reforms to the Constitution and
to request the convening of the Great Convention of Colombia, which should
assist the representatives of Venezuela. They began to talk of federalism as a
way of solving the problems of the country after August 1826, the Federation
proclaims Puerto Cabello and Maracaibo are pronounced, Aragua, Cumana, and in
Ecuador, Quito and Guayaquil.
The seed of the disruptive element against Grancolombiano ideas began
to germinate. The Cosiata, known as the movement to break up the unity forged by
Simon Bolivar, was beginning to set.
Was it because of an action of Paez, who received orders from Vice
President Santander, or was not the allegations of the centaur reasoned defense
of his proposal for conscription or enlistment of citizens to form the militia.
The question in our view, led to a rush of General Santander, who listened to
the wrong person, General Juan Escalona, who wanted to succeed Paez in the
direction of the department of Venezuela, and there begins the disintegration of
the seed against unit.This was a bad time of General Paez to the story as it was
charged as an abettor. But if we review his action or enforcement, which
deprived him understand the order and poor decisions, hurt their pride and their
followers not to accept the low given the general and responded with patriotic
pride to return to his seat at the general , and before the amendment of the
chairman of the Great Colombia, the culture medium began to pierce the groove of
the unit.
Despite this dissonance, General Paez had an attitude attached to his
principles and constitutional rule and that is seen when the Liberator comes to
his homeland in 1827 and recognizes the General Paez, the highest authority in
the department of Venezuela, and it also recognizes the authority of liberating
genius as the driver of the Great Colombia. But the damage had been done, so we
could say then that this fling is the first setback in the political life of the
centaur.
Forced exile
Then in 1848, while acting as president of Venezuela, General Jose
Tadeo Monagas, the same who had taken up arms against the republic in 1831, 1833
and 1835 with the so-called revolution of reform, which deposed the presidential
throne to the wise Jose Maria Vargas, there is the sad fact of murder in the
Congress Hon Santos Michelena, Jan. 24, a circumstance that is caused by trying
to ignore the parliamentary law by President Monagas, to which most members
parliament, with conflicting criteria for the president decided to move its
meetings to the city of Puerto Cabello, which is not accepted by the executive
and ordered the deployment of troops to the congress.
This action will produce the final break between the two leaders and
allows us to see a scolding Paez Monagas tumultuous this attitude, demanding
that he act with decorum and poise of the magistrate driver of the country. Here
we note that the general Monagas, despite having been proposed and supported by
Paez in his candidacy for the presidency, still acting as resentful of his late
presidential choice to the throne and assume that not forgive Paez, the delay.
Lucubrations us then, knowing Paez performance virtues and actions of
those who were the protagonists of the liberation struggle and their ideas,
support their legitimate aspirations to Jose Maria Vargas, the wise transformer
civilian college and proponent development of the nation by The Economic Society
of Friends of the Country and the free and compulsory education and military
virtue and guarantor of legality, General Carlos Soublette.
And he kept the centaur in their claims to guide the path of
democracy, but was not heard by Monagas, who turned his passion for political
opponents of the centaur and a confrontation ensued in which our biography was
offended, who from that time suffered the most cruel outrages and taunts by the
president, who is acting without attachment to respect for the institutional and
investment and honor, Paez sent to the dungeons of the castle of San Antonio for
his eminence in Cumana.
This was a tough test for the centaur, who was mocked his confidence
and began to feel firsthand the collapse of republican institutions.
Out hard again in 1850 to exile and has to face loneliness in
disgrace, but the pride of being one of the builders of the country, keep you
upright and through the exchange of letters kept alive the flame of the
country’s institutional catering, continues to write to their friends, civil and
military, the need to recover the path of order and progress that had been
established from 1830 to 1847, when it occurred governments acting under the
aegis of the constitution of 1830. In contrast, in those times could be seen as
the personal ambition of a family project, complemented by some incendiary
demagogues like Antonio Leocadio Guzman and Ezequiel Zamora, who among others,
tore the constitutional scaffolding built with such effort.
In these circumstances we venture to extract a quote from the
manifesto written by Paez August 1, 1848, before his imprisonment, which states
among many things, the following:
“The legal order that has been in Venezuela, has happened an order of
violence and oppression, a change with so fatal a history that can predict the
imminent risk of threat to society, career independence and freedom, not excused
sacrifices (…) The judge to whom my unhappy country in charge of their destinies
in the past year has become its bitterest enemy. General Jose Tadeo Monagas has
resumed the exercise of arbitrary power and hold, has aroused the fiercest
passions of a part of society against another, and called her about the men
identified by their crimes or complicity in the various conspiracies that have
convulsed Venezuela. ” (1)
This testimony show us that despite the good will of many of the
children of the fatherland, who always lined sheepskin puts his ambition against
the right to achieve their personal ends, causing a serious blow to progress and
the established order.
This blow is going to feel the general Paez, it will haunt the rest
of his life, and will suffer in the flesh in exile, destitute, of friends, your
family, in solitude without the helping hand unknown and act in good faith, but
the untamed plains, such as horse race course, tempered by the hard labor of the
field, heralded a new dawn and ate with the hope to continue doing their
experience and desire of the great nation, and after a long exile returns to his
long to try to rebuild the broken and before the insurgency of the so-called
federal, incidentally assumes the leadership of the country in 1860 until 1863,
when signing the treaty of Coche and is Venezuela under the leadership of John
————————————–
1.-Jose Antonio Paez, Documentary code.
P. 55.
Crisostomo Falcon, who by adopting the constitution of 1864 will
create the department in honor Vargas guayre~no wise, recognizing the talent and
Pro Builder policies of development.
With the signing of the car means the General Paez, who despite his
effort, love, detachment, by restoring the normal path of constitutional, must
give the spaces, times change, new actors insurgents different projects,
adequate new paradigms and ways of acting which was used to, and start a new
journey by land that sheltered him from the Caribbean to New York, with a short
transit to Buenos Aires.
Another exile for not returning
These new times overwhelm their concern, the family unit is not going
to rebuild, the homing instinct stimulated by the reminiscences and longing for
loved ones fed the feeling of fatherhood and fuels the desire to be with his
family, and as can not be physically with them, through exchange of letters is
more continuous, more demanding and takes advantage of all travelers to send the
message, as well as distressed by the demands of daily life and the lack of
economic resources, use all arguments so that their salaries will be restored to
pay for their stay in foreign lands in New York, as seen below in a letter to
Federico Hellmund:
“Everything is very expensive, the war gives hope for completion and
there is no way to win or maintenance, that’s why I’m thinking of St. Thomas
where if I can not do much, but I’ll be closer to my family who, if not I can
see some part of it may come to me and accompany me in case of disease “(2).
—————————-
2 .- Jose Antonio Paez, Documentary
code. P. 65.
But faint and continues in his plea, claiming their demands at all
levels as we appreciate it in another letter to his friend Federico Hellmund,
responsible for processing their claims against the Venezuelan government:
“I enclose a letter to General Falcon (…) that I say it as you see,
to understand with you about ways to pay me my salary, I think the best way is
that you arrange with the government, demanding him a warrant for the house here
Boulton me the appropriate amount and deliver me than you and that Boulton is
paid for the rights to be displayed by their introductions in La Guaira and get
it I want you to speak Falcon person “(3).
In 1864 will have a financial hardship relief in his efforts since
that achieves Guzman payment of their salaries, but this is not enough and was
thinking of starting a business based on the sale of coffee and brown sugar to
make their livelihoods, such as expressed in one of his letters to Hellmund in
1865:
“I’m doing a test here with sweet brown sugar, which I think can be a
productive speculation, and for that reason I want to know if you could get
beyond four or five thousand newsprint while the same quality as those mentioned
was” … ( 4)
That desire entrepreneur puts his ability to trade other items such
as coffee and even medications, and ask for more referrals Creole products for
sale.
All this indicates that when a person acts based on its principles
and values, attached to their customs righteousness does not cease to procure a
decent life and will continue to operate the centaur in a strange land, earning
the appreciation, esteem and solidifying the pedestal built up throughout his
life, at the expense of effort and perseverance.
————————————————– —
3 .- Jose Antonio Paez. Documentary
repertoire. P. 66.
4 .- Jose Antonio Paez. Ob.
Cit. P. 69.
That is the example to follow, the man who in spite of the
vicissitudes experienced was unwavering in its aspirations and principles, and
although he had to taste the bitter cup of exile, far from their loved ones and
friends, never ranted its country, but kept her pride and appreciation of the
planting done for the benefit of others.
Well acted and lived the centaur of the plains, known as the Taita
Paez, or as the man who took advantage of the times lived and solace to
cultivate and write his autobiography which is a work of reference for the study
of the War of Independence, and as also to meet the initial years in the
construction of the Venezuelan Republic, but also took time to time to study the
theory and notation and delight at various stages of the world running with
piano master keys to get rhythm and harmony.
Ladies and gentlemen, friends, friends, thank you very much.
Remarks on June 13, 2009, in ASOPREDI in Catia La Mar, Municipio
Vargas, on the occasion of 219 anniversary of the birth of General Jose Antonio
Paez.
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