Bolivar: American Liberator

Contents

Epigraph

Maps

1.
The Road to Bogotá

2.
Rites of Passage

3.
The Innocent Abroad

4.
Building a Revolution

5.
The Rise and Fall of Miranda

6.
Glimpses of Glory

7.
The Legions of Hell

8.
A Revolution Struggles to Life

9.
The Hard Way West

10.
The Way to Glory

11.
The Chosen Son

12.
Under the Volcanoes

13.
In the Empire of the Sun

14.
The Equilibrium of the Universe

15.
Era of Blunders

16.
Man of Difficulties

17.
Plowing the Sea

18.
The General in His Labyrinth

Epilogue

Photographs

Acknowledgments

About Marie Arana

Notes

Bibliography

Index

For Rosa Victoria Arana and George Winston Arana, my loyal and lifelong accomplices.

You can’t speak with calm about a person who never knew calm; of Bolívar you can only speak from mountaintops, or amid thunder and lightning, or with a fistful of freedom in one hand and the corpse of tyranny at your feet.

—José Martí

CHAPTER
1

We, who are as good as you, make you our lord and master.

We trust you to defend our rights and liberties.

And if not: No.

—Coronation ceremony, Spain, c. 1550

T
hey heard him before they saw him: the sound of hooves striking the earth, steady as a heartbeat, urgent as a revolution. When he emerged from the sun-dappled forest, they could barely make out the figure on the
magnificent horse. He was
small, thin. A black cape fluttered about his shoulders.

The rebels eyed him with unease. All four had been riding north, fully expecting to come upon a royalist fleeing in the other direction, away from the battle at Boyacá. Three days before, the Spaniards had been surprised by a lightning strike of revolutionaries—barefoot, wild-eyed—swarming down over the Andes. The Spanish were running now, scattering over the landscape like a herd of frightened deer.

“Here comes one of those losing bastards,” said the rebel general. Hermógenes Maza was a veteran of the wars of independence in Spanish America.
He had been captured and tortured by royalists, had honed a hunger for revenge. He spurred his horse, rode forward.
“Halt!” he cried out. “Who goes there?”

The rider pressed on at full gallop.

General Maza raised his lance and bellowed his warning one more time. But the stranger only advanced, ignoring him. When he got near enough to render his features sharp and unmistakable, he turned coolly to glare at the rebel general.
“¡Soy yo!”
the man shouted. “Don’t be a dumb sonofabitch.”

The general’s jaw went slack. He lowered his lance, let the horseman pass.

So it was that Simón Bolívar rode into Santa Fe de Bogotá, the capital of the New Kingdom of Granada, on the
sweltering afternoon of August 10, 1819. He had spent thirty-six days traversing the flooded plains of Venezuela; six days marching over the vertiginous snows of the Andes. By the time he reached the icy pass at thirteen thousand feet called the Páramo de Pisba, his men were
barely alive, scarcely clothed, flogging themselves to revive their failing circulation.
He had lost a third of them to frost or starvation, most of his weapons to rust, every last horse to hypothermia. Even so, as he and his scruffy troops staggered down the cliffs, stopping at villages along the way, he had rallied enough fresh recruits and supplies to win a resounding victory that in time would link his name to Napoleon’s and Hannibal’s. As news of his triumph spread, it quickened the rebels’ hopes and sent a cold prick of fear through the Spaniards.