Bolivar: American Liberator (17 page)

In time, Miranda
took control of the
Gazeta de Caracas
, the capital’s journal of record. The junta’s leaders, all of whom were in their thirties, were hardly fazed. They considered him pompous, laughable, and—most damning of all—hopelessly out of step with the times. Nevertheless, Miranda’s efforts began to pay off with the colored classes, a logical enough development for a candidate whose father had been forced to prove his “cleanliness of blood.” In popular assemblies, the pardos gathered to flex their collective muscle and make demands. Little by little, they took positions that were formerly reserved for whites; they penetrated high posts in the military. The rich Mantuanos were aghast. In March of 1811, they responded with a large-scale reorganization of the government: thirty-one representatives, all from landed families, joined
congress, the majority of them in favor of King Ferdinand’s rule; in place of the junta, an executive body of three rotating presidents was put in place. By June, however, those three newly anointed officials awoke to a new reality. For all their efforts, there was little doubt who had the overwhelming support of the people.
Miranda’s Patriotic Society was well in the lead.

CHAPTER
5

Liberty is a succulent food, but hard to digest.

—Jean-Jacques Rousseau

F
or all Miranda’s and Bolívar’s abounding successes, not everything was right between them. First, there was the matter of Miranda’s extreme arrogance, which even the fussy Mantuanos found insufferable. He was flagrantly egotistical, a name-dropper, incapable of responding to praise with praise. The former head of the junta, Juan Germán Roscio, was aghast at his behavior at banquets given in his honor:
“He listened to toasts with enormous satisfaction and then simply let them pass, as if everyone there were his inferior. The polite expressions so familiar to people of good breeding never once left his lips.”

Bolívar’s irritation with Miranda was compounded by the animus between him and the Marquis del Toro, one of Bolívar’s oldest and dearest friends. The hostilities had begun years before, when
the marquis received more than one letter from Miranda suggesting that he take advantage of Napoleon’s Spanish invasion to create a local junta and break relations with the
madre patria.
The marquis would later become one of the most ardent supporters of independence, but at a time when so little was known, his first reaction was to report Miranda’s letters to the presiding captain-general, who, in turn, reported them to Cádiz.
Miranda would never forget it. Difficult to forgive, too, was Bolívar’s unequivocal loyalty to the marquis. Not only had the del Toros and Bolívars enjoyed a warm friendship for generations; the marquis was an uncle to María Teresa, Bolívar’s dead wife.

The uneasy relations between Miranda and del Toro came to a head when the congress decided to pass over Miranda’s considerable military experience and place the Marquis del Toro in command of the newly formed War Department. It was a surprising dismissal. There was simply no one in Venezuela, the proud marquis included, who could match Miranda’s credentials as a warrior. Bolívar was torn, but
he refused to be disloyal to his wife’s uncle. And so, despite the shared dreams and ambitions, a seed of mistrust was sown. When in June congress discussed the possibility of a military assignment for young Bolívar, the old general pronounced—perhaps not unreasonably—that Bolívar was unprepared for a post of any consequence. He was
too raw a soldier, Miranda sniffed, too impulsive.

This bickering was soon dwarfed by an uproar in congress, when it was discovered that one of the newly appointed members, Feliciano Montenegro y Colón, was actually an agent for the Regency and had
absconded with the War Department’s plans. The flagrant theft had an electrifying effect on the fledgling government. Why were Venezuelans continuing to pledge loyalty to a king who would send spies to steal precious documents? On July 1, Cristóbal Mendoza, a member of the executive triumvirate that rotated the presidency, condemned this affront publicly and announced that perhaps
the moment had come to discuss total sovereignty of the nation. Hearing these words, the citizens of Caracas, who had always leaned toward total independence, stirred with excitement. The halls of congress burst to life as men, women, and children poured in to hear the arguments. One by one, representatives made their way to the podium, some cautioning prudence, others thundering their outrage against Spain and the Regency. Members of the Patriotic Society, too, clamored to make their censure known. On the night of July 4, Bolívar took the floor at a special meeting of the society, arguing in strong, unequivocal terms for absolute independence.
“Let us valiantly lay the cornerstone of South American liberty!” he cried. “To hesitate is to perish!” A British traveler who was present recalled:

Among all the rest, young Bolívar stood out for his piercing voice, his agitated, imperious manner, and especially for the unforgettable fire in his eyes, which burned with all the intensity of a conquistador’s or a visionary’s. He was small in stature, thin, lightly tanned, with an angular brow and sunken temples, small hands and feet, and the dress of a European gentleman. . . . I listened to him speak and, although I didn’t know the language perfectly, I understood him to say that he would die before he would allow his country to be a slave to Spain. He was a commanding presence in that hall and everyone seemed to know it. They told me he was a nobleman of considerable wealth, but that he was willing to give all of it for his country’s freedom. It seemed to me that the young man was destined either for an early death or extraordinary heroism.

All night long, young revolutionaries, fueled by drink and fury, swarmed the streets, defacing the property of the crown. The next morning, on July 5, the halls of congress teemed with greater ferment.
Miranda took the floor and gave a report on the most recent dispatches from the Spanish peninsula: the Duke of Wellington had just defeated the armies of Napoleon’s greatest marshal, Masséna, for the second time. Soon Spain would be free of Napoleon, and its generals would turn their attention to subduing the colonies and unraveling all the freedoms they had put in place. If they cared about the future of Venezuela, he said bluntly, now was the time to act.

It was an irresistible appeal. That afternoon, the question of separation from Spain was put to a congressional vote; it passed with only one dissenting voice. The acting president of the triumverate, Cristóbal Mendoza, declared absolute independence and the first republic was born. Miranda triumphantly unfurled his tricolor banner—yellow, red, and blue—and Caracas went wild with jubilation. Late into the night, revelers delivered ecstatic speeches on the plaza, ripped Spanish flags to shreds, broke into private homes to destroy portraits of the king, and the royalists cringed, fearing the wrath of Cádiz and the vengeance of heaven.

For Bolívar, the joys of that seminal victory were soon tempered by sorrow. He learned that his brother, Juan Vicente, had died in a
shipwreck on the way home from his diplomatic mission to the United States. It would be a while before Bolívar would know the details of his brother’s demise, but eventually he would understand that not much of that trip had gone well. Luis de Onís, Spain’s ambassador in Washington, had
duped Juan Vicente into believing that the Regency was about to recognize the Venezuelan government, and so the gentle-hearted Juan Vicente spent the 70,000 pesos entrusted to him not for guns, but for farm equipment—not for swords, but plowshares. As his ship made its way south, it ran into a hurricane off the coast of Bermuda. Both he and his cargo were dashed into rocks by a merciless August wind.

EVEN AS THE BLOODIED HEAD
of Mexico’s ferocious rebel priest Miguel Hidalgo swung from a rooftop in Guanajuato so that the world could see how Spain dealt with revolutions, republican Venezuela was caught up in the euphoria of its newly declared independence. Patriot gangs in Caracas rounded up Spaniards and royalists and stripped them of all weapons.
Blacks taunted the wellborn, addressing them as “citizens” and menacing them in the streets. Pardos were granted high posts in the military and welcomed at balls and celebratory dinners. Some, reported one Englishman,
“carried insolence so far as to demand in marriage the daughters” of former (white) magistrates. Even so, King Ferdinand’s loyalists were not easily cowed. Within days they organized a retaliatory uprising in northwest Caracas, where they gathered with
cutlasses, muskets, and improvised tin shields. “Long live the king!” they cried, riding against the new masters. “Death to the traitors!”

But it was a shabby show of force and patriot troops succeeded in rounding them up quickly: sixteen prisoners were lined up against a wall and shot, then hanged, after which their heads were shoved onto stakes and displayed—Hidalgo-style—in every corner of the city. The retaliation was swift and brutal, but even the mild-mannered intellectual Juan Germán Roscio, chief architect of the new government, approved it.
“Unless we spill blood, our rule will be seen as weak,” he wrote his friend Andrés Bello, who was still living in Miranda’s house in London.

Although the framers of the new republic claimed the establishment of a full democracy, it soon became clear that democracy would have a
different face in Venezuela.
Only citizens who owned property would have the right to vote; others would merely have the right to
“enjoy the benefits of the law without participating in its establishment.” Bolívar was dismayed. Miranda, who originally had envisioned a unified America under the rule of a hereditary Inca, was equally distressed, but their views were largely ignored as congress set out to fashion a constitution. Miranda and Bolívar may have disagreed on some points—Bolívar wanted all Spaniards expelled, while Miranda was willing to let them stay—but they agreed completely on the notion that the new republic would need, more than anything, a united purpose and a strong central government to deliver it. Congress, on the other hand, favored a loose federation of states that would preserve old ruling factions, and it set out to write a constitution that would ensure that existing class structures prevailed. The result was anything but egalitarian. The military remained segregated (even the black militias were to be headed by whites); the slave trade was suspended, but slave owners could keep the slaves they had; and although pardos were told they were now free from “civil degradation,” they were given no ballot and no franchise in the future of the republic. The constitution, in short, handed all power to rich whites, and it fooled no one.

Almost immediately, Spain’s agents, including the Church, moved to take advantage of the injustices. The archbishop of Caracas directed his priests to educate blacks and pardos about the racial discrimination inherent in the new laws. Royalists traveled up and down the coast trying to provoke a slave insurrection. It didn’t take long for their strategy to work. Slaves, outraged that they they had been cheated of their promised freedom, rose up against their Creole masters, raiding their country estates, massacring whole families, burning fields, and demolishing property. As whites recoiled in horror, the black counterrevolutionary ranks only swelled, drunk now with newfound power.

In Maracaibo, Coró, and Guayana—a vast swath that reached from the agriculturally rich west to the eastern savannas—the poor and exploited pledged undying devotion to King Ferdinand. Cacao fields languished in the sun, mines went neglected, and the economy began a dangerous downward spiral. On July 19, 1811, a violent uprising erupted in the city of Valencia, less than a hundred miles from the
capital. Congress decided to send the Marquis del Toro and his troops to quell it, but neither the congress nor del Toro himself had much faith they could accomplish their mission. Just months before, the junta had directed the marquis to put down a royalist disturbance in Coró, and
the old nobleman, more comfortable in a salon than on a field of battle, had proceeded to correspond politely with the leaders of the port city he was supposed to besiege. Eventually, when diplomacy failed, he had set out over two hundred miles of desert road with defective ammunition and a few obsolete cannons, borne on the backs of slaves. Only one in ten of his soldiers carried a gun. When they arrived, the Spaniards simply sprayed them with grapeshot, and the general and his troops turned and fled for their lives.