Bolivar: American Liberator

by Marie Arana

It is hardly surprising that, over the years, Latin Americans have learned to accept human imperfections in their leaders. Bolívar taught them how.

It is no exaggeration to say that Bolívar’s revolution changed the Spanish language, for his words marked the dawn of a new literary age. The old, dusty Castilian of his time, with its ornate flourishes and cumbersome locutions, in his remarkable voice and pen became another language entirely—urgent, vibrant, and young.

“Divide and subjugate” had been the rule. Education had been discouraged, in many cases outlawed, and so ignorance was endemic. Colonies were forbidden from communicating with each other, and so—like spokes of a wheel—they were capable only of reporting directly to a king. There was no collaborative spirit, no model for organization, no notion of hierarchy.

To lead the new troops from Mérida, Bolívar installed Vicente Campo Elías, a Spaniard by birth who so loathed his native land that he had murdered some of his own relatives and vowed that when he had finished killing every last Spaniard in Venezuela, he would turn his sword on himself and end the accursed race.

Campo Elías finally met Boves in battle at La Puerta, but for all his army’s ferocity, it was no match for the thundering hordes of angry horsemen. The Legions of Hell took the republican infantry easily, leaving a thousand corpses in their wake.

His widow, Josefa Palacios, the sister of Bolívar’s mother, fell mute, shut herself in her room, and, for seven long years, refused to open the door.

One of Bolívar’s aides-de-camp, a young English captain named Chamberlain, had shot himself in the head rather than surrender to the enemy. When a Spanish officer began to paw at Chamberlain’s wife and then tried to take her by force, she took out a pistol and killed him. Infuriated, the officer’s men hacked her to pieces on the spot.

Of the more than eight hundred men who had started out in full uniform and high hopes, only 150 set foot in Angostura. They hadn’t been such seasoned veterans, after all. They were adventurers, dreamers, in search of the fabled land of El Dorado. None had actually shown proof of service to López Méndez,

Directly before them was the abrupt rise of Cundurcunca, a scruffy behemoth of dirt, rock, and shrubbery. To the right, mounting hills; to the left, a stream; behind, a sheer drop to another plain, and long vistas as far as the eye could see. There was no place to hide on that grim plateau. The terrain allowed for no cowards or laggards, no long, attenuated battle. As the sound of cornets and drums began to resonate through that theater of war, reechoing against the mountain walls, Sucre’s soldiers were well aware that there was no choice for them but to win.

Riding through neatly formed columns of men from every station of life, every corner of the Americas and beyond, the young general in chief—then but twenty-nine—was visibly stirred by the significance of the moment. He stopped and, with a voice brimming with emotion, shouted words they would never forget: “Soldiers! On your efforts today rests the fate of South America!” They answered with a resounding roar.

Monet told Córdova that in the royalist ranks, as in the patriot, there were soldiers with relatives on the opposite side: would he allow them to greet each other before hostilities began? When General Córdova consulted with Sucre, the general in chief agreed immediately. And so it was that fifty men of opposing sides met on the slopes of Cundurcunca, among them a number of brothers, to embrace and weep—as one chronicler put it—in a heartbreaking display of farewell.

Not Alexander, not Hannibal, not even Julius Caesar had fought across such a vast, inhospitable terrain. Charlemagne’s victories would have had to double to match Bolívar’s. Napoleon, striving to build an empire, had covered less ground than Bolívar, struggling to win freedom.

Even as Bolívar was wending his way back to Lima in late 1823, she had written to her husband in no uncertain terms: No, no, no, hombre! . . . A thousand times No! Sir, you are an excellent person, indeed one of a kind—that I will never deny. I only regret that you are not a better man so that my leaving you would honor Bolívar more. I know very well that I can never be joined to him in what you call honor. Do you think I am any less honorable because he is my lover, not my husband? Ah! I do not live by social conventions men construct to torment us. So leave me be, my dear Englishman. We will marry again in heaven but not on this earth. . . . On earth, you are a boring man. Up there in the celestial heights, everything will be so English, because a life of monotony was invented for you people, who make love without pleasure, conversation without grace—who walk slowly, greet solemnly, move heavily, joke without laughing. . . . But enough of my cheekiness. With all the sobriety, truth, and clarity of an Englishwoman, I say now: I will never return to you. You are a protestant and I a pagan—that should be obstacle enough. But I am also in love with another man, and that is the greater, stronger reason. You see how precise my mind can be? Your invariable friend, Manuela She would later send a copy of this letter to Bolívar, adding coyly that she was hardly a pagan, but had said so for dramatic effect. Certainly to the rest of Lima she seemed diabolically pagan. Even in a city...

Wow.

He yearned to be the father of a federation of nations and said so very plainly to Santander. You rule Colombia, Bolívar told him, “so that I may be permitted to govern all South America.” It was why he would apply himself so vigorously to organizing the Congress of Panama. He knew this would not be easy. He had always made it clear that the continent could not function as a single, integrated country; the landmass was too sprawling, the population too diverse. To complicate matters, Spain had never encouraged camaraderie among its colonies—travel and commerce had been forbidden and punished by death—and so for three hundred years the colonies had answered to Madrid as spokes to a hub, with no contact whatsoever among them. They did not know one another well enough to be fellow citizens.

Indeed, rumors of a pending coup were so widespread by then in Bogotá that a woman had been emboldened to go directly to the palace and report what she had heard to Manuela Sáenz. When Manuela fretted about it to Bolívar, he consulted his entourage, but nothing came of it. The men had a good laugh and concluded that it was like women to imagine things.

Lafayette was deeply respectful, almost adoring in his praise. As far as he was concerned, Bolívar had accomplished more than Washington; he had freed his people in far more difficult circumstances. North America’s revolutionaries had been uniformly white, after all; and their values had been shared ideals, their faith overwhelmingly Protestant. In South America, on the other hand, Bolívar had cobbled liberty from a gallimaufry of peoples and races; and he had done so by “sheer dint of talent, tenacity, and valor.”