Bolivar: American Liberator (2 page)

The capital of the viceroyalty was the first to react. On hearing of Bolívar’s advance, agents of the crown
abandoned their houses, possessions, businesses. Whole families took flight with little more than the clothes on their back. Maza and his companions could hear the
deafening detonations as Spanish soldiers destroyed their own arsenals and hurried for the hills. Even the cruel and ill-tempered viceroy, Juan José de Sámano, disguised as a lowly Indian in a poncho and grimy hat, fled the city in a panic. He knew that Bolívar’s retribution would be swift and severe. “War to the Death!” had been the Liberator’s battle cry; after one battle, he had called for the
cold-blooded execution of eight hundred Spaniards. Sámano understood that
he, too, had been ruthless, ordering the torture and extermination of thousands in the name of the Spanish throne. Reprisals were sure to follow. The king’s loyalists flowed out of Santa Fe, as Bogotá was then called, flooding the roads
that led south, emptying Santa Fe until its streets were eerily silent and the only residents left were on the side of independence. When Bolívar got word of it, he leapt on his horse, ordered his aides-de-camp to follow, and
raced ahead, virtually alone, toward the viceroy’s palace.

Although Maza had fought under the Liberator years before, he hardly recognized the man passing before him now.
He was gaunt, shirtless, his chest bare under the ragged blue jacket. Beneath the worn leather cap, his hair had grown long and grizzled. His skin was rough from wind, bronzed by the sun. His trousers, once a deep scarlet, had faded to a dull pink; his cape, which doubled as a bed, was stained by time and mud.

He was thirty-six years old, and, although the disease that would take his life already coiled in his veins, he seemed vibrant and strong, filled with a boundless energy. As he crossed into Santa Fe and made his way down the Calle Real, an old woman rushed toward him.
“God bless you, phantom!” she called, sensing—despite his dishevelment—a singular greatness. House by house, others ventured out, at first tentatively, and then in a surging human mass that followed him all the way to the plaza. He
dismounted in one agile movement and ran up the palace steps.

For all his physical slightness—
five foot six inches and a scant 130 pounds—there was an undeniable intensity to the man. His eyes were a piercing black, his gaze unsettling. His forehead was deeply lined, his cheekbones high, his teeth even and white, his smile surprising and radiant. Official portraits relay a less than imposing man: the meager chest, the impossibly thin legs, the hands as small and beautiful as a woman’s. But when Bolívar entered a room, his power was palpable. When he spoke, his voice was galvanizing. He had a magnetism that seemed to dwarf sturdier men.

He enjoyed good cuisine, but could endure days, even weeks, of punishing hunger. He spent backbreaking days on his horse: his stamina in the saddle was legendary. Even the
llaneros,
roughriders of the harsh Venezuelan plains, called him, with admiration, Iron Ass. Like those men, he preferred to spend nights in a hammock or wrapped in his cape on bare ground. But he was equally comfortable in a ballroom or at the opera. He was a superb dancer, a spirited conversationalist, a cultivated
man of the world who had read widely and could quote Rousseau in French and Julius Caesar in Latin. A widower and sworn bachelor, he was also an insatiable womanizer.

By the time Bolívar mounted the stairs to the viceroy’s palace on that sultry August day, his name was already known around the world. In Washington, John Quincy Adams and James Monroe agonized over whether their fledgling nation, founded on principles of liberty and freedom, should support his struggle for independence. In London, hard-bitten veterans of England’s war against Napoleon signed on to fight for Bolívar’s cause. In Italy, the poet Lord Byron named his boat after Bolívar and dreamed of emigrating to Venezuela with his daughter. But there would be five more years of bloodshed before Spain was thrust from Latin American shores. 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. The odds against which he fought—a formidable, established world power, vast areas of untracked wilderness, the splintered loyalties of many races—would have proved daunting for the ablest of generals with strong armies at his command. But Bolívar had never been a soldier. He had no formal military training. Yet, with little more than will and a genius for leadership, he freed much of Spanish America and laid out his dream for a unified continent.

Despite all this, he was a highly imperfect man. He could be impulsive, headstrong, filled with contradictions. He spoke eloquently about justice, but wasn’t always able to mete it out in the chaos of revolution. His romantic life had a way of spilling into the public realm. He had trouble accepting criticism and had no patience for disagreements. He was singularly incapable of losing gracefully at cards. It is hardly surprising that, over the years, Latin Americans have learned to accept human imperfections in their leaders. Bolívar taught them how.

As Bolívar’s fame grew, he became known as the George
Washington of South America. There were good reasons why. Both came from wealthy and influential families. Both were ardent defenders of freedom. Both were heroic in war, but apprehensive about marshaling the peace. Both resisted efforts to make them kings. Both claimed to want
to return to private lives, but were called instead to shape governments. Both were accused of undue ambition.

There the similarities end. 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.

But perhaps what distinguishes these men above all can be seen most clearly in their written work. Washington’s words were measured, august, dignified—the product of a cautious and deliberate mind. Bolívar’s speeches and correspondence, on the other hand, were fiery, passionate. They represent some of the greatest writing in Latin American letters. Although much was produced in haste—on battlefields, on the run—the prose is at once lyrical and stately, clever but historically grounded, electric yet deeply wise. 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.

There is yet another important difference. Unlike Washington’s glory, Bolívar’s did not last unto the grave. In time, the politics in the countries Bolívar created grew ever more fractious, his detractors ever more vehement. 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.

By the time he was forty-one, his wisdom began to be doubted by functionaries in every republic he had freed and founded. His deputies—jealous and wary of his extraordinary power—declared they no longer supported his dream of a unified Latin America. Regionalisms
emerged, followed by border squabbles, civil wars, and, in Bolívar’s own halls, cloak-and-dagger betrayals. Trumped at last, he had no choice but to renounce command. His forty-seventh—and final—year ended in poverty, illness, and exile. Having given away the sum total of his personal fortune to the revolution, he died a poor and ravaged man. Few heroes in history have been dealt so much honor, so much power—and so much ingratitude.

But on the afternoon of August 10, 1819, as he stood at the viceroy’s splendid desk in the palace in Santa Fe de Bogotá, there was no limit to the possibilities of Bolívar’s America. The Spanish despot had left the room in such alarm that he had
neglected to take the bag of gold on his table. Indeed, as Bolívar lay claim to the
hoard of pesos left behind in the viceregal treasury, he understood that the tide had finally turned: his revolution stood to inherit all the abandoned riches of a waning empire. It would also inherit a whirlwind of political and social chaos. In a matter of a few years, Spain’s three-century yoke on the Americas would be sundered and the truly difficult journey toward freedom would begin.

THE JOURNEY OF SIMÓN BOLÍVAR’S
life began in 1783, a year that was rife with incident. In an otherwise unremarkable building in Paris, Benjamin Franklin and John Adams signed a treaty with the king of England that effectively ended the American Revolution. In the radiant palace of Versailles, an emotionally fragile Marie Antoinette lost the much awaited child she was carrying. In an austere military academy in northeastern France, an adolescent Napoleon was developing a keen interest in war games. In the ancient city of Cuzco, the cousin of Túpac Amaru II led a violent insurrection against the Spanish, for which he was tortured, killed, and dismembered. In a drinking establishment in Manhattan, George Washington ended his command of the Continental Army by bidding a warm farewell to his officers.

But in the balmy city of Caracas, walled from the vicissitudes of the Caribbean by a string of green mountains, life was a sleepy affair. On July 24, 1783, as dawn filled the windows of the Bolívar family’s stately mansion in the center of the city, the only sound was
the serene trickle of drinking water filtering through rock into a pantry jar. Before long, the cock would crow, the horses neigh, and a whole bustling household
complete with children and slaves would burst to noisy life as Doña María de la Concepción Palacios y Blanco went into labor.

She was a dark, wavy-haired beauty whose will and fortitude belied her twenty-three years. She had been married at fourteen to Colonel Don Juan Vicente de Bolívar, a tall, self-possessed, blond bachelor thirty-two years older, whose
predatory sexual escapades had often landed him before the bishop of Caracas. Both man and wife brought long traditions of wealth and power to their marriage: their elegant manse on San Jacinto Street and the extensive properties they had inherited over the years were a measure of their station in a privileged world. On that summer’s day, as they awaited the birth of their fourth child, they owned no fewer than twelve houses in Caracas and the port of La Guaira, a sprawling hacienda in the valley of Aragua, a copper mine, sugar fields, fruit orchards, a rum distillery, a textile business, cacao and indigo plantations, as well as cattle ranches, and hundreds of slaves. They were among the most prosperous families of Venezuela.

As Latin American custom has it, in a ritual that goes back five hundred years, no sooner had word of Doña Concepción’s labor spread from the servants to the neighbors than friends began to
gather in the house’s parlor to await the birth. By the time the child was born that night, a festive crowd of well-wishers was toasting his health, among them the bishop, the judge, the velvet-sleeved patriarchs of Caracas’s old families, and a rich priest who would baptize the boy and, within a matter of months, bequeath him a fortune. They stood in the great room, resting their elbows on
ponderous carved mahogany chests and tables. The chairs were covered in dark upholstery; the mirrors heavy with decoration; the damask curtains a deep, gleaming purple, crowned with cornices of burnished gold. The servants offered refreshments from trays and, under the glittering chandeliers, the conversation was jovial and lighthearted. One by one, intimate family members were admitted to the
chamber next to the living room, where they saw the pale mother bedecked in white lace, sitting up in bed under a brocade canopy. Beside her, in a lavish cradle, was the sleeping child.

Although she previously had borne three healthy children—María Antonia, who was then six; Juana, five; and Juan Vicente, two—Doña Concepción was well
aware that she was ailing. As soon as she told
Don Juan Vicente of her pregnancy, he arranged for
one of their prized female slaves to marry, conceive, and deliver a child at about the same time so that his wife could be relieved of the responsibility of nursing the newborn. It was a common enough practice at the time. The black slave Hipólita would prove to be a devoted nursemaid whose tender attentions to the boy would later be vividly remembered, even glorified, but on July 24, she had yet to give birth and had no milk to offer her master’s child. For the first few weeks of the infant’s life, Doña Concepción had to rely on one of her closest friends—
Inés Mancebo, the Cuban wife of Fernando de Miyares, who later became governor-general of Venezuela—to do the nursing. Frail but determined, Doña Concepción was making the best of things. She did not yet evince the yellow, waxen skin that betrays the victims of tuberculosis. The small circle of intimates who gathered in her bedroom had every expectation that mother and boy would thrive.

Though Don
Juan Vicente’s lively blue eyes shone as he chatted with friends and relatives in the parlor, those eyes, too, were lit with his wife’s fever. Consumption, as it was known, was prevalent in the world at that time, but in few places was it more rampant than in the sweltering South American tropics. The colonel was nearing sixty and
looked far older than his years, yet, when the priest asked him what name he wanted to give his son, he
replied with youthful energy. “Simón,” he said, and pointed to the image of the man whose bold, confident face dominated the room.