Photo of the Day: José de San Martín Monument, Central Park, NYC

Longtime New York Times columnist James Reston wrote that Americans would do anything for Latin America except read about it. Let’s see how many of my readers disprove his contention.

I came across the equestrian statue in this photo a couple of weeks ago, when I was walking near the entrance to Central Park at 59^th Street and Avenue of the Americas. It pays tribute to José de San Martín (1778–1850), a general who led Argentina, Chile, and Peru to independence from Spanish rule—then remarkably, instead of seizing power, as so many post-independence soldiers did over the last two centuries, resigned his post.

The San Martin statue, dedicated in 1951, is a smaller-scale replica of one in Buenos Aires created in 1862 by the French sculptor Louis-Joseph Daumas.

Whether intentional or coincidental, the Central Park version faces another equestrian statue of a second Latin American liberator, Simon Bolivar, as if in commemoration of their historic July 1822 encounter in Guayaquil, Peru.

Nobody is quite sure what the two commanders said in this closed-door meeting, but two months later San Martin resigned his title as “Protector of Peru,” in an attempt to ensure South American unity.

That hope was frustrated. Two years later, dismayed over the continued fracturing of the nations he’d just helped free as well as the death of his wife from tuberculosis, San Martin set sail with his daughter for Europe, and never returned. Following his death in France in 1850, his remains were transferred to the Cathedral of Buenos Aires in Plaza de Mayo.

North Americans should know more about San Martin’s military campaigns. His 1817 crossing of the Andes particularly displayed his cunning, audacity, and precise planning. Before marching, he used Mapuche natives to spread misinformation about his next moves among the opposing Spanish forces.

A New York parade on the day I walked by prevented me from coming close to the statue, so it is a bit hard to see to its top, more than 34 feet off the ground.

But you can see from the photo that San Martin’s right arm is raised. I would guess that it’s not merely commanding his men in battle, but directing the 5,000 troops he had trained in Argentina into rugged passes in the Andes more than 10,000 feet high.

By the time he left the mountains and entered Chile, the Spanish royalist forces opposing him, confused by the false intelligence passed along through the Mapuches, did not know where to concentrate their forces. San Martin defeated them soundly at the Battle of Chacabuco.