The monument designed by Eloy Palacios is commonly known as La India del Paraíso. It was, perhaps, the first monument erected in Venezuela in the twentieth century to refer quite clearly to the country’s Indian past; hence the importance of the inaugural speech. What is strange, however, is that the so-called “Indian woman” at the very top was actually based on the European idea of Lady Liberty. The very opposite was true of the fountain that once sat in the Plaza de San Pablo, in Caracas in the nineteenth century, which did have a figure of an Indian woman, designed according to European iconography, with a christening robe and feather headdress. Venezuela’s Independence Charter was signed in 1811; on the first centenary of that historic date, a number of initiatives were undertaken by General Juan Vicente Gómez and his government, one of which was to commission a monument to commemorate the Battle of Carabobo, at which Venezuelan troops finally vanquished the Spanish crown’s army.
In his speech, the historian José Gil Fortoul (1861–1943) attempts to describe the symbolic meaning of the elements in the monument—the “rough rocks” that represent the Andes Mountains; the Andean condors; the three palm trees joined at the trunk to symbolize the union of Venezuela, New Granada (now Colombia), and Ecuador in what was once Gran Colombia—while excusing the fact that it was erected in Caracas rather than at the Campo de Carabobo, the site of the historic battle, as stipulated in the decree signed at Cúcuta in 1821. Fortoul claims that the decree will be honored in due course, when industry, art, the railways, and the airlines have managed to dispel the “bleak solitude and solemn silence” that haunt the field to this day. The monument was in fact erected among sugar cane plantations and palm groves, in an area that had recently (1895) been developed, just south of the historic center of Caracas. Fortoul’s speech is actually complemented by the “Idea del monumento a la Batalla de Carabobo” (1909), by the Venezuelan sculptor Eloy Palacios, which justifies replacing the attic column stipulated in the 1821 decree with palm trees, in accordance with Indian legends collected by the chronicler Arístides Rojas.
To grasp the modernity of the Venezuelan sculptor’s idea one need look no further than the monument erected in 1910 in Mexico City to commemorate Mexican Independence—a traditional attic column, designed by the architect Antonio Rivas Mercado, and crowned with the figure of an Angel made by the Italian sculptor Enrique Alciati.
Fortoul’s speech is published in Fuentes documentales y críticas de las artes plásticas venezolanas (2001), the book compiled by Roldán Esteva-Grillet.
