Small poor countries really have a hard time displaying culture. Jose Batres Montufar’s family decided to destroy their copies of his poems just after his death so to avoid trouble with the government. That would probably have been the end of all memory if his favorite dictator hadn’t had a statue made of him. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Welcome to todays offering from The Philatelist.
With most of his work not surviving, it is hard to judge Mr. Montufar’s talent, and with it the state of Guatemala’s nineteenth century poetry. He was really all they had. Well there was that bust though, so they have his likeness, and with a likeness you can make a stamp. The stamp then can give the illusion there was poetry once, a long time ago.
Todays stamp is issue A133, a 3 Centavos stamp issued by Guatemala in 1946. It was a four stamp issue with the highest denomination being airmail. According to the Scott catalog, the stamp is worth 25 cents used.
Pepe Batres, Jose Batres Montufar was a pen name, was born in 1809. He was a part of the rich Aycinena clan that had a monopoly in commerce in Guatemala back to Spanish colonial times. Pepe served as a soldier including a year spent as a prisoner of war held by the El Salvadorans. He rose through the ranks peaking at Captain in command of an engineering unit of the Guatemala Army. His schooling was by tutors and Pepe was fluent in French, Latin, and eventually English. His poems were romantic and heavily influenced by Lord Byron.
In 1829 the political left took over in Guetemala and the Aycinena clan had their properties seized and was forced into exile. The family claims the properties were handed out to bunch of liberal creoles and halfbreeds. They were understandably annoyed but looking at their portraits perhaps they shouldn’t be throwing stones from glass houses on ethnicity.
For a while Pepe was safe in the Army but as pressure on him grew he took leave to take part in a Central American funded expedition to map out a possible Atlantic-Pacific canal in Nicaragua. The expedition was lead by Englishman John Baily. The expedition was under resourced and got stuck in the rainforest. Pepe returned to Guatemala sick and dejected.
The Aycinena clan made a comeback in Guatemala funding the peasant army of Rafael Carrera. Though leading a peasant army and allegedly personally illiterate, once in power Carrera built a grand stone opera house for his singing mistress and across from it a statue of the great Guatemalan poet Jose Batres Montufar. At the time Pepe was serving in Carrera’s Army as a military provincial governor.
After Pepe died his family worried that his work would annoy the political right because it poked fun at them and annoy the left because of who his family were. The opera house, I did a stamp on it here, https://the-philatelist.com/2017/11/06/guatemala-columbus-theatre-still-impressive-on-the-stamp-but-really-in-ruins/ , went through many changes trying to stamp out the memory of Carrera before collapsing in an earthquake in 1920. The very top of Pepe’s statue was remounted as a bust and given to the national library.
Well my drink is empty and I will pour another to toast the illiterate General Carrera who saw to it that Guatemala would at least remember the poet they couldn’t read. Come again tomorrow for another story that can be learned from stamp collecting.