Bolivar: American Liberator (14 page)

If Spain’s kings had been easy to dupe, its people were not. Years later,
Talleyrand would write that the invasion of Spain was more than a crime. It was a gross miscalculation—a patent stupidity—with disastrous consequences for Napoleon: the people of Spain surprised their more powerful invader by mounting a fierce guerrilla war. A virtual firestorm shook the country day and night as ordinary citizens took up arms against the French. Napoleon’s generals responded by sacking
Spain’s cities, garroting its leaders, raping its women. But Madrid’s resistance was implacable. The city would not be subdued until the French generals summoned the infamous Mameluk cavalry to trample the crowds.

Even as the
madre patria
erupted in violence, even as ruling juntas sprang up around Spain, proclaiming loyalty to King Ferdinand, her colonies lived on in languid ignorance. The English blockade had silenced communication across the Atlantic, and Thomas Jefferson’s misguided Embargo Act, announced just months before, had choked all north–south trade and compounded the isolation. In Caracas, the news that Spain had been savagely overrun by France was not known until a full seven months later, in early July of 1808, when
two old, dog-eared issues of the London
Times
arrived in the governor’s office, sent on by a functionary in Trinidad. The publications seemed harmless enough, four-page broadsheets with real estate and shipping news. But wedged in between the notices was the remarkable revelation that the Spanish king had been deposed and Napoleon now occupied the country. Andrés Bello—then secretary to the most important Spaniard in Venezuela, Captain-General Juan de Casas—translated the notices for his boss, who simply dismissed them as English lies.
The facts were confirmed days later, however, when two ships—a French brigantine and an English frigate—arrived simultaneously in La Guaira with versions of the same story. The French agents, dressed in resplendent uniforms, presented the captain-general with an official document signed by Joseph Bonaparte, announcing that Spain had capitulated to France and that the colonies were now under Napoleonic rule. The captain of the English ship, on the other hand, came huffing over the mountain from La Guaira to call the French liars and report that the Spanish people had not yielded. Indeed, according to his account, Spain had undertaken a bloody war, a junta in Seville now represented the embattled nation, and Britain had pledged its unconditional support.

This news had a profound and galvanizing effect on the colony. Dissidents like Bolívar began to wonder if it was their moment. Why didn’t they form their own junta? Why should they bow to some hastily extemporized, reduced body in Seville? Hadn’t they always claimed they
could govern themselves? In all, one thing was sure: the Creoles would never allow Napoleon to rule Spanish America.
Within days of arrival in Caracas, Joseph Bonaparte’s agents met with such outright hostility and ridicule that they were forced to flee the city and skulk off into the ink of night.

The Creole movement to set up a self-governing junta was immediate. Marquis del Toro received
a letter from Francisco Miranda urging the Venezuelans to wrest power while they could. The marquis was hesitant, but others on the Caracas city council were not. They made an impassioned request to the captain-general to allow them to install their own government, which, like the junta in Spain, would remain loyal to King Ferdinand. The captain-general, who had received no instructions from the king’s court, feared that he had no choice but to please the clamoring masses beyond his door. Grudgingly, he agreed.

For many in Bolívar’s circle, this was the moment they had prayed for—a chance to seize the reins and shape their economic destinies. They gathered eagerly to form a local junta and, at least outwardly, profess loyalty to Ferdinand. But Bolívar demurred. His convictions about independence were absolute; he had
little patience for those who would take up the banner of liberty while pledging allegiance to a king. Moreover, King Ferdinand was someone he knew—an insufferable little whiner with whom he had sparred as a boy—a man for whom he had no respect. And if Bolívar despised the prince, he loathed the queen, whose lechery was notorious and whose weaknesses he knew intimately through one of her many lovers, his friend Manuel Mallo. The strongest contempt, however he reserved for Carlos IV, whose dithering and inadequacies had enslaved an empire. Bolívar had spent too much time nursing his animus to let go of it now. His abhorrence of Spain was so great, as he later wrote, that it
dwarfed the sea that separated him from it. He continued to meet with his less demanding colleagues, but
refused to compromise. He decided to watch and wait.

It proved a shrewd choice.
On August 3, Captain-General Casas received yet another visitor from Spain, Joaquín Menéndez, the representative of the
madre patria
’s new Central Junta. To Casas’s great relief, Menéndez confirmed Casas’s position as the colony’s ruler and
ordered him to take all future commands from Seville. That was all the ammunition Casas needed. Overnight, the Creoles who were working to establish a separate, Venezuelan junta were branded outlaws. The most brazen among them, Manuel de Matos, who had tried to incite an insurrection in the city plaza by calling for the immediate expulsion of all Spaniards, was arrested and put behind bars. General Casas’s son made a visit to the Bolívar brothers to warn them to stop hosting their conspiratorial meetings.
“But I’m totally innocent!” Bolívar protested. Still, he made a point to leave the city for a while. As fate would have it, his lawsuit against Briceño was still in the courts and he had just been elected mayor of a town near his hacienda—which allowed him to look too busy to cause much trouble.

The captain-general’s newly confirmed power over the colony launched an era of caution. Dissidents now conducted meetings in strictest confidence; only trusted friends were admitted now. These were hardly society’s malcontents but men of prestige—wealthy, educated, respected—from families with long and illustrious histories.
“For the first time,” as royalist historian José Domingo Díaz put it, “we were seeing a revolution fomented and carried into execution by the very persons who had most to lose.” The circle was composed of the Marquis del Toro and his brothers, men at the pinnacle of power for generations; the Tovars, who lived in the colony’s most opulent houses; Juan Vicente and Simón Bolívar, who owned, among many valuable properties, the coveted copper mines of Aroa; the Montillas, who were considered men of fashion, well acquainted with the king’s court. These were not fortune hunters, but the wellborn, the rich, who expected more from government and believed they alone could deliver it.

By then, the Bolívar brothers had grown far more radical than most of their fellow Mantuanos. When the venerable eighty-three-year-old Count of
Tovar drew up a formal letter on behalf of “the most distinguished gentlemen of the city,” requesting the right to assembly and identifying his fellow Creoles as “vassals of Don Fernando VII,” the Bolívars staunchly refused to add their signatures. Within days of receiving the letter, Captain-General Casas rounded up the old count and his collaborators—including Bolívar’s uncles, Pedro Palacios and José
Félix Ribas—and threw them all in jail. They didn’t stay long. The chaos of ongoing war in Spain and the absence of any true direction from Seville were such that even the captain-general couldn’t be entirely sure who his enemies really were.

It didn’t matter. By May of 1809, there was a new captain-general, Field Marshal Vicente Emparán.
Napoleon had recommended him long before, when France and Spain had been allies. Proving the turmoil and contradictions of the time, Emparán’s appointment was
blessed by Napoleon’s bitterest enemy, the junta in Seville. A further irony: accompanying Emparán to Caracas was none other than Fernando del Toro, Bolívar’s brother-in-law and old hiking companion in Europe, who had risen through army ranks to become Emparán’s inspector general. Bolívar suddenly found himself in a strategically advantageous, if thorny, position. His in-laws, the del Toros, like many Creole families, represented a slew of conflicting allegiances. Fernando was at the very heart of the new governor’s offices, but he was also the brother of a revolutionary—the Marquis del Toro. Not only that, but Fernando had been witness to an incriminating scene: he had been on Monte Sacro when Bolívar had vowed to overthrow the king.

And yet there was no king. Ferdinand VII’s power had always been a figment, a fabrication. He was a prisoner languishing in Bayonne, still in Napoleon’s clutches, incapable of ruling a far-flung empire. For all the hatred that Napoleon could inspire in Spanish America, for all the fierceness of his ambition, no one could deny that the French emperor’s invasion had opened the door to American possibility. Creoles understood this. They knew that they were suddenly at great advantage and needed to work quickly; perhaps they also suspected that to pledge loyalty to a prisoner king was merely a political convenience, an empty gesture, a way to camouflage dissent.

But unruly times make for unruly opportunities, and although Creoles had common interests, they did not always agree. Many with close family ties to Spain were adamantly against making a clean break with the
madre patria
, arguing that they only wanted a few more rights, a bit more control over their economic aspirations. The more independent-minded insisted that severing the tie was essential, but strategies varied wildly. To complicate matters, a new social reality was at work. The
revolution could not count on support from blacks, pardos, and the indigenous. Few nonwhites favored independence, fearing that, without Spain’s oversight, the Creole landowners for whom they labored would grow more brutal. Eventually, those racial tensions would come to play a defining role in the wars for independence. But even now, at the dawn of that foreboding, rich Creoles began to feel that all was not right in their fields or kitchens. The more fevered the conversations in the drawing rooms, the more frequent
the escapes from servant quarters, as slaves slipped away in the cover of night, seeking freedom on the open plains.

The first declaration of independence, “
el primer grito
,” came in mid-1809, even as Emparán was settling into his new quarters in Caracas. It began a thousand miles away in Spain’s colony of Quito, as Creoles ejected their overlords and took government into their own hands. Although those attempts were short-lived—squelched within months in a series of bloody strikes—the machinery of revolution had sputtered into uncertain motion. On Christmas Eve, the Creoles of Caracas, Bolívar among them, prepared to storm city hall, but the new captain-general was warned in advance and managed to put a stop to it.
Emparán had Bolívar taken aside and told him to stop consorting with enemies of the state, but Bolívar was no longer trying to mask his politics. His response was civil but firm. The warning was clear enough, he replied calmly, but he and his revolutionary cohort had long since declared war on Spain; in time, the world would see the result.

Few who knew him would have predicted at this juncture that Bolívar would go on to play an essential role in the war for independence. The Spaniards and Creoles respected him for his pedigree, his wealth, and his obvious brilliance, but neither side imagined him as a leader. Only Juan Vicente, his brother, had any hopes in this regard. Nominating Bolívar to head the circle of conspirators as they colluded one night in their house on the Río Guaire, Juan Vicente found his proposal roundly dismissed. Simón Bolívar was too young, his fellow rebels said—too untried, too impulsive, too incendiary.

AS WAR RAVAGED THE IBERIAN
Peninsula and Spain’s cities fell to Napoleon one by one, the Central Junta was forced to flee Seville. Its members
eventually took refuge in Cádiz. By the end of January 1810, they had reconstituted the government and named the new ruling body the Regency. Among the many changes the Regency decreed was a fundamental shift in the way Spain would treat its colonies: Spanish America would now be an integral part of the nation. Welcome as these words sounded, they turned out to be patently untrue. The finer letter of the law revealed that colonials would not be allowed to vote, nor would their districts be granted equal representation. On April 17, four months after all this was signed into law, delegates of the Regency arrived in Caracas and pronounced it a fait accompli, papering the city with posters.

One of the Regency’s representatives, as it happened, was Carlos Montúfar, the young aristocrat from Quito who had accompanied Humboldt on his expedition and befriended Bolívar and del Toro in Paris. The three young men had lived together on Rue Vivienne and spent many a night in Fanny’s salon, toasting the American future.
Bolívar hurried down to La Guaira to meet his friend and hear the latest news. What he learned—that the Central Junta had been dissolved, that Napoleon had Spain on its knees, that the Regency was struggling to keep its hold on the colonies—was all the intelligence he needed.

Within twenty-four hours, the conspirators were planning a coup that would depose the captain-general and take control of Venezuela. Emparán had proven to be a weak governor, a master of ambiguities, indecisive at every turn—friendly, possibly, to France because of his previous service to Napoleon. Friendly, even, to certain outspoken rebels: to Fernando del Toro’s family, for instance, and to Simón Bolívar himself. He was clearly a soft mark, and the Creoles were confident they could achieve his ouster without bloodshed. They met
at three in the morning on Maundy Thursday—April 19, 1810—at the house of José Angel Alamo. According to one witness, there were nearly one hundred of them.
Whether Bolívar was there that day is a point of much debate. Some historians—present in Caracas at the time—have claimed that he was, although his name appears on no documents. Others say that Emparán had warned him to make himself scarce or be subject to imprisonment or exile. Still others claim that Bolívar recused himself from that final meeting, because by then he knew it would be dominated by those
who were not true seekers of independence but crypto-royalists willing to make concessions.