Leaders who still cause trouble from the grave

Time‘s Tim Padgett digs into the international political implications of Hugo Chavez’s latest stunt, digging up the remains of independence hero Simon Bolivar, who died in Colombia in 1830: 

Few have promoted that speculation more passionately than Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, who in his marathon speeches extols the demigod Libertador the way priests summon Christ at Mass. Chávez, who calls his left-wing, anti-U.S. movement the Bolivarian Revolution, has never really been able to accept the idea that Bolívar may have perished from natural causes and not as a result of intrigue-filled martyrdom. So when a U.S. doctor last spring presented research at a University of Maryland conference on the deaths of famous people — findings that suggested Bolívar died from arsenic poisoning — Chávez started to arrange for the Liberator’s exhumation to test that hypothesis. "In my heart, for years, I’ve had the conviction that Bolívar didn’t die of tuberculosis," Chávez declared. "I think they assassinated him."[…]

Doctors aren’t the only ones concerned, because the Bolívar assassination theory has contemporary political ramifications. Chávez, who took office in 1999, has for years insisted that he himself is a target for assassination, not only by dark forces in the U.S. but also in neighboring Colombia, whose outgoing President, the more conservative and U.S.-friendly Alvaro Uribe, Chávez has frequently accused of wanting to attack Venezuela.

With Venezuela’s oil economy slumping and Chávez’s socialist party facing unusually competitive parliamentary elections in September, his critics suggest that reviving the idea of Bolívar’s martyrdom in Colombia could be a move by Chávez to galvanize his political base.

There’s a strange fetishism to the way Chavez has been touting the remains, tweeting, ""That glorious skeleton has to be Bolivar, because his flame can be felt. My God."

Bolivar is the second former leader who’s been rudely awakened this year. The body of Cyprus President Tassos Papadopoulos was stolen by grave robbers for a number of weeks, prompting a nation-wide cadaver-hunt . Because of Papadopolous’ hardline Cypriot nationalist politics, a political motive was suspected, but it turned out the crooks were just after ransom. 

After a coup in Argentina in 1955, military leaders confiscated the embalmed body of iconic first lady Eva Peron, and moved it around a number of times, even stashing it under some old papers in a Major’s attic. It was eventually moved to the villa in Spain where her husband, former President Juan Peron was living in exile. At one point a leftist group stole even stole the body of one of the generals who organized the coup to use a bargaining chip to get Evita back to Argentina. Juan Peron’s hands were also sawed off and stolen in 1987. 

Then there is the perennial debate over Lenin’s Tomb in Red Square, which Russian leaders acknowledge "does not quite fit today’s realities" but is still too politically sensitive to move. 

Political corpse controversies are older than Antigone and the Egyptian government has had some success in recent years in getting its the pharaohs returned from Western museums. But the ancient idea of leaders’ bodies retaining their power after death is one that has remained oddly resistant to change. Of course, it will all be academic in the post-zombie world.