Decolonialidad Testamentaria: Una Nueva Categoría para Reinterpretar el Testamento y la Última Proclama de Simón Bolívar (1830)

Abstract

Simón Bolívar's political thought has been extensively examined from historical, legal, and republican perspectives. However, his Testament and Final Proclamation, both dictated on December 10, 1830, have rarely been interpreted as a unified philosophical and political corpus. This theoretical gap has prevented scholars from recognizing how these final documents articulate an ethical project intended to outlive their author and guide the future of Latin America. This article reinterprets both texts through the lens of decolonial theory and introduces the concept of testamentary decoloniality, defined as the intergenerational transmission of ethical, political, and epistemic principles aimed at sustaining emancipatory projects against the persistence of coloniality. The study employs a qualitative, hermeneutic-documentary methodology supported by constructivist grounded theory procedures to conduct a comparative analysis of the two primary sources. The findings reveal that Bolívar's final legacy extends far beyond the legal distribution of property, constituting instead an ethics of historical responsibility grounded in unity, collective memory, forgiveness, renunciation of power, and the unfinished task of independence. The article concludes that testamentary decoloniality broadens contemporary decolonial theory by shifting the analytical focus from the structures of domination toward the mechanisms through which emancipatory projects endure, are transmitted, and are reinterpreted across generations. In doing so, it offers a novel conceptual framework for Bolívar studies, Latin American political philosophy, and Southern epistemologies.