German Arciniegas; Colombian Intellectual

German Arciniegas, a leading Colombian intellectual who was an influential critic of military governments in South America, has died.

Arciniegas died of lung failure at a Bogota hospital on Nov. 28, eight days short of his 99th birthday.

The author of nearly 70 books, Arciniegas was also a prominent columnist, writing for El Tiempo, Colombia’s leading newspaper, La Nacion in Buenos Aires and Diario las Americas in Miami. He founded Colombia’s National Museum and taught at UC Berkeley, Mills College, the University of Chicago and Columbia University.

He served as a Colombian congressman, twice as education minister, and as ambassador to Israel, Italy and Venezuela.

From the outset of his writing career in the early 1930s, Arciniegas was a controversial figure with South American governments. His support for democracy ran contrary to the combination of military and strongman rule that was often the norm in Central and South America.

His 1952 book, “The State of Latin America,” condemned the absence of democratic rule in several South American countries and was burned by officials in his homeland and banned in other South American countries.

“The increasing withdrawal of representative forms of government in our America places us ever more outside the democratic world,” he wrote. “Sixty million inhabitants live in 10 nations where some of all of the rights consecrated in the charter of human rights are ignored.”

Arciniegas pressed strongly for human rights and democracy, warning that people excluded from free societies represent “a revolutionary reserve, which could fatally erupt.”

The book, which has been updated and released at least 10 times since its original publication, is considered a classic in South American letters.

In 1953, Arciniegas was forced to flee Colombia to escape repressive measures written into that country’s constitution equating political criticism with treason. But even in the United States, Arciniegas, who was then teaching at Columbia, was arrested and detained by immigration officials and kept overnight at Ellis Island after reports surfaced that he had Communist leanings.

Political action seemed to run in the genes of German Arciniegas. His great-grandfather, Pedro Figueredo, was an independence-era rebel and wrote Cuba’s national anthem, “La Bayamesa.” He was later executed by the Spanish for leading Cuba’s insurrectionist army.

Arciniegas spent his youth on his father’s dairy farm outside Bogota, but became an agent for radical change when he entered law school at the prestigious National University. He urged that Jesuit control of the curriculum be loosened, and organized a nationwide student federation to protest government educational programs and policies.

“It was the era of Theodore Roosevelt and the bitter loss of Panama,” he said in an interview some years ago. “We were anti-clerical, anti-Yankee and anti-imperialist.”

He joined the university faculty after graduating with a law degree but left in 1928 to become editor of El Tiempo. He would continue an association with El Tiempo until the end of his life.

Much of his writing was in support of the ideal of America. He held that the discovery of the New World was the single most cataclysmic happening since the birth of Christ.

In “America in Europe: A History of the New World in Reverse,” Arciniegas argued that “the influence of the New World on the Old has been neglected by historians.”

In his view, the mixture of blacks and indigenous peoples with liberated Europeans from countries like Spain, Russia, France, Germany and England created unequaled innovations in political thought, art, science, economics and culture. These innovations eventually found their way back to the Old World ports that the Europeans had departed from decades earlier.

“Everything from the time of the revelation of America on back seems to us today as fictional as a novel, as mythical as a painting,” he wrote. “With America, the modern world begins. Scientific progress begins, philosophy thrives. By means of America, Europe acquires a new dimension and emerges from its shadows.”