Bolivar: American Liberator

by Marie Arana

At the end of that savage and chastening war, one man would be credited for single-handedly conceiving, organizing, and leading the liberation of six nations: a population one and a half times that of North America, a landmass the size of modern Europe.

Bolívar’s military action lasted twice as long as Washington’s. The territory he covered was seven times as large and spanned an astonishing geographic diversity: from crocodile-infested jungles to the snowcapped reaches of the Andes. Moreover, unlike Washington’s war, Bolívar’s could not have been won without the aid of black and Indian troops; his success in rallying all races to the patriot cause became a turning point in the war for independence. It is fair to say that he led both a revolution and a civil war.

Eventually, he came to believe that Latin Americans were not ready for a truly democratic government: abject, ignorant, suspicious, they did not understand how to govern themselves, having been systematically deprived of that experience by their Spanish oppressors. What they needed, in his eyes, was a strong hand, a strict executive. He began making unilateral decisions. He installed a dictator in Venezuela; he announced to Bolivia that it would have a president for life.

Las Casas wrote of Columbus. Finally, in an impassioned plea to Charles V, he argued that institutionalized barbarism had cruelly decimated the Indian population: “Spaniards are still acting like ravening beasts, killing, terrorizing, afflicting, torturing, and destroying the native peoples.”

At midnight on April 1, 1767, all Jesuit priests were expelled from Spanish America. Five thousand clerics, most of them American-born, were marched to the coast, put on ships, and deported to Europe, giving the crown unfettered reign over education as well as over the widespread property of the Church’s missions. King Carlos IV made it very clear that he did not consider learning advisable for America: Spain would be better off, and its subjects easier to manage, if it kept its colonies in ignorance.

Spain also fiercely suppressed American entrepreneurship. Only the Spanish-born were allowed to own stores or sell goods in the streets. No American was permitted to plant grapes, own vineyards, grow tobacco, make spirits, or propagate olive trees—Spain brooked no competition. It earned $60 million a year, after all (the equivalent of almost a billion today), by selling goods back to its colonies.

The Cartagena Manifesto, as it became known, stands as one of the great documents of Latin American history.

For Bolívar, the clashes with Castillo and Santander would mark the beginning of a long struggle with his subordinates. He would learn in time that for every revolutionary brother there was a ready traitor; and for all his vision of a unified Colombia, there were small-minded obstructionists, happy to lord over their tiny turfs.

For Bolívar, a war to the death was a retaliatory measure; he had believed it would unite Americans against foreigners. The result was quite the opposite: Americans turned against Americans—Venezuelans took up weapons against their neighbors—and the revolution became a racial conflict, a full-fledged civil war.

Mostly, during those days of forced idleness, he vacillated between determination and pessimism. He was as moody as a tiger in a cage.